Re: [Xen-users] Guest O/S Questions

[Anthony Liguori <aliguori@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Williamson wrote:

> > I have just recently discovered the XEN VMM and am trying to familiarize
> > myself with it.  I'm a newbe at it, so bear with me.
> >    
> No probs, here goes...
>
>  
>
> > I'd like to install an O/S onto a guest virtual machine.  Domain 0 is RHEL4
> > on Xen 2.0.7.  My question is how I would go about installing from a set of
> > distribution CD's (say RHEL4 or SUSE9) into a file-backed VMM.  Can anyone
> > help me out with this?
> >    
> Installing into a file-backed VBD from a distro CD is tricky.
Actually, if you use QEMU to install the distro into a raw disk, and you 
only create one partition on the disk, you should be able to just use a 
command like this:
dd skip=63 bs=512 if=qemu.img of=xen.img

Keep in mind, I've not tried this myself :-)

Exporting the qemu image as /dev/hda in domU and just setting your 
parameters right seems to work well and is much simplier.
Regards,

Anthony Liguori

>  If you really 
> want to use the distro CD then the easiest thing is to install into a spare 
> partition and use that as your virtual machine disk.  (it'll also perform 
> better than a file-backed VBD)
> Otherwise, debootstrap (Debian) and rpmstrap (works with Redhat, maybe Suse) 
> may be worth looking at: just mount the loop file and use one of these 
> programs to install into the directory.
> Cheers,
> Mark
>
>  
>
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Nick Couchman
> > Systems Integrator
> > SEAKR Engineering, Inc.
> > 6221 South Racine Circle
> > Centennial, CO 80111
> > Main: (303) 790-8499
> > Fax: (303) 790-8720
> > Web: http://www.seakr.com
> >    
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>
>  

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