[CentOS] Xen or VMWARE on CentOS 5

Wed Feb 27 14:29:33 UTC 2008
Ross S. W. Walker <rwalker at medallion.com>

Rudi Ahlers wrote:
> Ross S. W. Walker wrote:
> >
> > I'm not a big fan of Redhat's version of Xen and use the Xen 3.2 
> > packages from xen.org as it has better management features through 
> > 'xm'. You will need to compile your own for 64-bit though as they only 
> > provide 32-bit binaries by default and if you want to run Xen as a 
> > hosting server you really must use 64-bit, but thankfully they provide 
> > the SRPM for it which makes that trivial.
> >
> > As far as VMware goes. It works exactly as it does on Redhat 
> > Enterprise Linux, so if you go over to the VMware forums and search 
> > RHEL, those comments should apply equally well to CentOS.
> >
> > -Ross
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: centos-bounces at centos.org <centos-bounces at centos.org>
> > To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org>
> > Sent: Wed Feb 27 07:12:04 2008
> > Subject: [CentOS] Xen or VMWARE on CentOS 5
> >
> > Does anyone out there have a comprehensive tutorial on installing 
> > VMware and successfully managing virtual machines with 
> either xen or 
> > vmware?
> >
> > 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------
> 
> 
> Hi Ross
> 
> I'm looking for the same thing, but you have "stirred" 
> somethings up in me.
> 
> If I want to setup CentOS 5.1 64bit, and make it a XEN host, then 
> install CentOS 5.0 / FreeBSD 6.0 / Fedora Core 7 32bit guests on it, 
> would it work well?

Yes, 32-bit PVM on 64-bit host has been supported since 3.1 I believe,
32-bit HVM on 64-bit host has been supported even longer.

> And if you say it needs to be pre-compiled, can you please tell me howto 
> do this? What / which files do I need, and how do I get them to work on 
> a 64bit CentOS 5.1?

On the 64-bit development system, get the base development system
installed with,

# yum groupinstall development-tools

Get the kernel-devel includes and configs installed and rpmbuild
installed along with the redhat standard rpm config,

# yum install kernel-devel rpm-build redhat-rpm-config

Install xen.org's SRPM,

# rpm -ivh xen-3.2.0-0xs.centos5.src.rpm

'cd' into /usr/src/redhat/SPECS and do a,

# rpmbuild -ba xen.spec

'rpmbuild' will tell you what else you need to install to get it to
build fully. Tex/LaTex/Texi are the largest requirements to build, and
only for the documentation part, so if you comment out the documentation
and remove those build requirements you could get by with less.

> Currently I'm busy creating a custom installation CD for CentOS 5.1 
> 64bit, and would like to then include the re-compiled XEN components in 
> my kickstart. The installation CD installs the bare minimum for CentOS 
> to run as an OS, since we're using cPanel - which installs the rest

Yes, we do PXE installs with kickstart here for bare metal and virtual
servers and have our own in-house repository for things like this and
some other third party software that isn't part of CentOS and it has
cut time to deploy new servers down to about 5 minutes.

-Ross



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