[CentOS-virt] CentOS 6 VM image for paravirtualizaton on CentOS Xen server

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 9:11 PM, Grant McWilliams
<grantmasterflash at gmail.com> wrote:

> Nico,
>    I wrote tutorials on how to do this when I was using xen. I haven't used
> these tutorials in a couple of years but they worked then so they should
> still work now.  This is for an automated CentOS 6 (x86_64).
>
> http://grantmcwilliams.com/item/538-centos-6-virtual-machine-64-bit-installation-on-xen
>
> Grant McWilliams
> http://grantmcwilliams.com/

I'm reading your notes. They're not bad, but they make me nervous in a
number of ways.

* VM's should *always* be assigned stable, but unique MAC's for the
network devices. This prevents the udev settings, and tendency of
tools like NetworkManager and anaconda from being unable to configure
network devices that they've stored hard-coded MAC addresses for.
There is *no* GUI or built-in command line tool for clearing these,
you have to do it by hand. There are various ways to deal with this,
but allowing the virt-install or similar tools to assign a MAC *once*
and then locking it down in the config file is quite effective.

Pre-planning your MAC addresses also allows DHCP reservations to be
configured, very useful for PXE setups and stabilizing your DNS and
firewall configuraitons.

* Don't install rpmforge anymore by default: it's effectively moribund
since Dag Weiers moved on to other projects, and isn't getting
updates. You can now install EPEL with 'yum install epel-release, and
unless you need tools that overlap with CentOS tools it's much safer.
(I wrote the last few subversion RPM's for RPMforge, and have been
waiting way too long for updates to be accepted.)

* Frankly, the use of 'virt-install' with a "--location" setting to
point to the online kernels from a relevant source repository, and
some options to select a disk image size,  seems to skip gracefully
over all the "manually build your disk image" and "manually edit your
/etc/xen/[config] file..

>
> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use
> Windows."
> Now they have two problems.
>
>
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