blog.jphoude.qc.ca

OK, so you downloaded an image from jailtime.org or you made your own image as described in my previous post, and now you want to install a Xen guest using it. Here’s how to do it :

Setup the dom0 (host OS)

Of course, Xen should be installed on the host OS. I use CentOS 5, so I just selected Xen during the installation. It will install a xen kernel that you should use to boot the host OS (dom0). I won’t go into details here, because that’s really easy to do with CentOS or Redhat Enterprise Linux. With other distributions, you could have to install distribution-specific packages, or use the official Xen package from xen.org.

Setup the target partition or logical volume

You should create a filesystem for the “root” partition and the swap. You could use simple files, but you will have better performance using real partitions or LVM volumes. LVM volumes also has other advantages, like the ability to create snapshots for backing up data, and easy resizing.

The following commands will create a 5GB root logical volume (LV) and 1GB swap in the /dev/vg0 volume group (VG). For more information about LVM, search for LVM howto in a search engine.

# root
lvcreate -L 5000M -n mailroot /dev/vg0
mkfs.ext3 /dev/vg0/mailroot
# swap
lvcreate -L 1000M -n mailswap /dev/vg0
mkswap /dev/vg0/mailswap

You can then mount the root partition and copy the base system (either an image from jailtime or an image you made yourself) on it.

mkdir /mnt/mailroot
mount /dev/vg0/mailroot /mnt/mailroot
# if you image contents is located in /centos...
cp -R /centos/* /mnt/mailroot/

Don’t forget to unmount the root partition when you’re done! Xen will not boot the domain if the partition is already mounted.

Download a kernel for the domU

The kernel that we will need to boot the domU has be to located in the dom0.

You can use the standard xen kernel that comes with CentOS to do that (e.g. vmlinuz-2.6.18-53.1.13.el5xen) , but you’ll also need an initrd, or the kernel won’t boot. To make the initrd, use the following command :

/sbin/mkinitrd --with=xennet --preload=xenblk /boot/initrd-centos5-xen.img 2.6.18-53.1.13.el5xen

This makes an initrd image with the required modules to boot a domU. The last parameter is the version of your kernel (the one you will use to boot the domU). You can get this number by typing “uname -r” on the command line. This will result in a /boot/initrd-centos5-xen.img image file.

Note (2008-02-14) : in a previous version of this blog post, I recommended to use a kernel from the official Xen distribution at xen.org. It worked, but it doesn’t seem to work anymore.

Create the configuration file

The configuration of the Xen guest is controlled by a simple text file. Create it as /etc/xen/yourdomUname, and move (or symlink) it in /etc/xen/auto if you want to start it automatically on boot.

Most basic parameters in this file are easy to understand. You should make sure “kernel” points to the kernel you copied from the xen tarball. “memory” is the amount of RAM allocated to the guest. “name” will be the name of the guest that you will use when connecting to it or shutting it down using the “xm” command.

“vif” contains information about network interfaces. One important thing in that line is the MAC address. If you don’t specify it here, a random MAC will be assigned at each boot, and that may not give good results. Edit the last 3 numbers (put anything, it just has to be unique across your network).

Finally, ‘disk’ is the parameter that tells Xen what partitions to use and what device name it will assign them. The last line, ‘root’, will tell the kernel what is the root device.

kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-53.1.13.el5xen"
ramdisk = "/boot/initrd-centos5-xen.img"
memory = 512
name = "mail"
vif = [ 'mac=00:16:3e:21:f1:31,bridge=xenbr0' ]
dhcp = "dhcp"
disk = ['phy:/dev/vg0/mailroot,sda1,w', 'phy:/dev/vg0/mailswap,sda2,w' ]
# The next line would be useful if you want to use an simple file instead of a partition/LV
#disk = ['file:/root/test.img,sda1,w', 'file:/root/centos.swap,sda2,w' ]
# We don't use pygrub, we boot the kernel directly from dom0
#bootloader="/usr/bin/pygrub"
root = "/dev/sda1 ro"

Boot the domain!

OK, you’re ready to boot the guest domain! Just issue the following command to “create” (which means boot, really) the domU.

xm create /etc/xen/YOUR_CONFIG_FILE -c

The -c parameter tells xm to connect to the domain’s console. You can disconnect from it by pressing CTRL+], and connect to it again with “xm connect NAME”.

If everything works right, you should see the login prompt appearing, and you will be ready to use the new guest domain!

Fix SSH

If you made the guest image yourself as I explained in my previous post (part 1), you need to create the random device to fix SSH (and probably other services that requires generating keys). Issue the following commands on the guest’s console :

/sbin/MAKEDEV generic
/etc/init.d/sshd start

Tags: centos, linux, lvm, redhat, xen

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 at 11:46 am and is filed under sysadmin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.