Xen config iso

After guiding you through installation, this section describes a selection of common installation and deployment scenarios. XenServer installs directly on bare-metal hardware avoiding the complexity, overhead, and performance bottlenecks of an underlying operating system. It uses the device drivers available from the Linux kernel. As a result, XenServer can run on a wide variety of hardware and storage devices.

The Xen Hypervisor : The hypervisor is the basic abstraction layer of software. The hypervisor is responsible for low-level tasks such as CPU scheduling and is responsible for memory isolation for resident VMs. The hypervisor abstracts from the hardware for the VMs.

The hypervisor has no knowledge of networking, external storage devices, video, etc. Besides providing XenServer management functions, the Control Domain also runs the driver stack that provides user created Virtual Machines VMs access to physical devices. The management toolstack : Also known as xapi, this software toolstack controls VM lifecycle operations, host and VM networking, VM storage, user authentication, and allows the management of XenServer resource pools.

Do not install any other operating system in a dual-boot configuration with the XenServer host; this is an unsupported configuration. Installers for both the XenServer host and XenCenter are located on the installation media. The installation media also includes the Readme First, which provides descriptions of and links to helpful resources, including product documentation for XenServer and XenCenter components.

While an installer for XenCenter is included in the installation media, more recent versions of XenCenter are provided as a separate download on the XenServer 7. We recommend that you get the latest version of XenCenter from this page.

The latest version of XenCenter supersedes the previous versions. To download the installer, visit the XenServer Downloads page.

The main XenServer installation file contains the basic packages required to set up XenServer on your host. You can install any required supplemental pack after installing XenServer. Download the supplemental pack filename. The installer presents the option to upgrade if it detects a previously installed version of XenServer. The upgrade process follows the first-time installation process, but several setup steps are bypassed.

The existing settings are retained, including networking configuration, system time and so on. Upgrading requires careful planning and attention. For detailed information about upgrading individual XenServer hosts and pools, see Upgrading XenServer.

Throughout the installation, quickly advance to the next screen by pressing F Use Tab to move between elements, and Space or Enter to select. For general help, press F1. Installing XenServer overwrites data on any hard drives that you select to use for the installation.

Back up data that you wish to preserve before proceeding. Following the initial boot messages and the Welcome to XenServer screen, select your keymap keyboard layout for the installation.

If a System Hardware warning screen is displayed and hardware virtualization assist support is available on your system, see your hardware manufacturer for BIOS upgrades.

XenServer ships with a broad driver set that supports most modern server hardware configurations. However, if you have been provided with any additional essential device drivers, press F9. The installer steps you through installing the necessary drivers.

Only update packages containing driver disks can be installed at this point in the installation process. However, you are prompted later in the installation process to install any update packages containing supplemental packs. As a hack you could symbolically link this directory to another disk or partition where you might want to keep the images.

Adding new disks is virtually identical to what we have done in the first step. Add disk, make sure it is detected, create a partition table and format it. Then, mount it on some mount point in your system. Finally, create a new storage repository:. The actual post is in Spanish, but the explanations and the images are self-explanatory. You really don't need any translations.

So there you go, a bonus thingie for you. Adding storage repositories in this manner may seem awfully complex to you, especially if you've used KVM storage management or ran Xen from the command line before. LVM does add a lot of operational flexibility, but it makes administration less accessible to most users.

Furthermore, the lack of filesystem transparency creates a problem when you need to figure out a special, custom setup. What if there's a new type of repository available? Since those early days, Linux and the BSDs have become quite good at supporting more pieces of hardware fairly quickly after they are birthed. Xen Project leverages that support by using the drivers in the Control Domain's operating system to access many types of hardware. Dom0 forms the interface to the hypervisor.

Through special instructions dom0 communicates to the Xen Project software and changes the configuration of the hypervisor. This includes instantiating new domains and related tasks. Instead the devices are attached to dom0 and use standard Linux drivers.

Dom0 then shares these resources with guest operating systems. The backend and frontend use a high-speed software interface based on shared memory to transfer data between the guest and dom0.

There are also paravirtualized interrupts, timers, page-tables and more. You can read more about how the Xen Project system is architected, paravirtualization and the benefits of such here:. The most basic of these is virtualization of the CPU itself. Dom0 also emulates some hardware using components of qemu the Quick Emulator.

Emulation in software requires the most overhead, however, so performance is reduced. It is quite possible to have virtualization features in the chipset that cannot be enabled because the mobo isn't designed for it.

Having said all of that, sometimes the easiest or only way to see what is supported is to check the BIOS. However, it is highly recommended so that you have the widest number of options for virtualization modes once you get underway. Paravirtualization will work fine though. It is worthwhile digging around on this a bit.

You may even find one is enabled by default but the other is not! Consult your motherboard documentation for more assistance in enabling virtualization extensions on your system. Burn the ISO to disk using your computer's standard utilities. Linux has wodim among others or use the built in ISO burning feature in Windows. Debian is a simple, stable and well supported Linux distribution.

It has included Xen Project Hypervisor support since Debian 3. Debian uses the simple Apt package management system which is both powerful and simple to use. Installing a package is as simple as the following example:. Many popular distributions are based off of Debian and also use the Apt package manager, if you have used Ubuntu, Linux Mint or Damn Small Linux you will feel right at home. Install the system The Debian installer is very straight forward.

Follow the prompts until you reach the disk partitioning section. Format it as ext3. Create another partition approximately 1. When you reach the package selection stage only install the base system. If you want to set up a graphical desktop environment in dom0, that's not a problem, but you may want to wait until after you've completed this guide to avoid complicating things. You can find out details of the Debian installation process from the Debian documentation. If you've got any hardware you're not sure open source drivers are available for , you may want to install non-free firmware files via:.

We've still got a few more steps to complete before we're ready to launch a domU, but let's install the Xen Project software now and use it to check the BIOS settings. All of this can be installed via an Apt meta-package called xen-linux-system.

A meta-package is basically a way of installing a group of packages automatically. The new disk and boot lines are shown below. Once again, reconnect via VNC, and once booting is complete, you should be greeted by the login prompt! Go ahead and login as root using the password created during installation. We then want to check the network settings to ensure that the domain will be properly configured when booting in PV mode, since Xen's console kinda sucks, and we won't have VNC access at that point.

Also check to ensure the kernel supports paravirtualization, and also detects that it is being virtualized. To do this, run dmesg grep paravirtual -- this should something like Booting paravirtualized kernel on Xen HVM. If so, we should be good to go.

Go ahead and shutdown -h now. Then xl destroy xr1 from the hypervisor.