NOTE: SLC4.5 is not released yet, this procedure will be possible only after 23.05.2007

EXPERIMENTAL installation of XEN Hypervisor on host SLC45/i386 or SLC45/x86_64 system

The Xen hypervisor provided shall install on most of Intel 32bit / PAE enabled hardware available. For efficient guest systems support foresee 1GB of RAM and about 10-30 GB of disk per guest system... (to see if your CPU supports PAE try:

grep pae /proc/cpuinfo

on your system)

Base install of SLC45/i386 or SLC45/x86_64 host system

Start by base install of SLC45 + cern-addons group. (or update your current SLC4 system to SLC45 by running yum update)

• make sure SELinux is in 'warn' or 'disabled' mode, not 'enforcing'

After installation completes:

• disable iptables:

      /sbin/service iptables stop
      /sbin/chkconfig --del iptables

• disable kudzu:

      /sbin/service kudzu stop
      /sbin/chkconfig --del kudzu

• configure NTP and make sure ntpd runs (this is required for at least paravirtualized guests):

     lcm --configure ntpd
     /sbin/chkconfig ntpd on
     /sbin/service ntpd start
     

• Please verify that SELinux is in disabled or permissive mode (or xen kernel will not boot). Edit

  /etc/sysconfig/selinux

  and make sure that there is a line saying:

  SELINUX=disabled

  or

  SELINUX=permissive

• install yum config for SLC4/i386 dom0/domU:

     /bin/rpm -ivh http://linuxsoft.cern.ch/cern/xen/slc4X/i386/RPMS/yum-xen-conf-4X-1.slc4.cern.noarch.rpm
     

• Or on an x86_64: install yum config for SLC4/x86_64 dom0:

    /bin/rpm -ivh http://linuxsoft.cern.ch/cern/xen/slc4X/x86_64/RPMS/yum-xen-conf-4X-1.slc4.cern.noarch.rpm
     

Installation of Xen hypervisor and Host Domain (dom0) kernel

• install xen/kernel-xen:

     /usr/bin/yum install xen kernel-xen
     

  Above yum command will install the hypervisor and dom0 kernel plus it will upgrade glibc/mkinitrd/e2fsprogs to versions compatible with xen. Also some other packages alike device-mapper-multipath or bridge-utils on which Xen depends will be installed on your system.

• check that /etc/grub.conf contains a stanza alike:

     ...
     title Scientific Linux CERN SLC (2.6.18-8.1.3.slc4xen)
          root (hd0,0)
          kernel /xen.gz-2.6.18-8.1.3.slc4 dom0_mem=512M com1=9600,8n1 console=vga,com1
          module /vmlinuz-2.6.18-8.1.3.slc4xen ro root=LABEL=/  xencons=ttyS console=tty0 console=ttyS0
          module /initrd-2.6.18-8.1.3.slc4xen.img
     ...

• (and that it is the boot default.)
• reboot the system to Xen NOW

     /sbin/shutdown -r now

Guest SLC3/SLC4 (DomU) domain(s) installation

• see: InstallingXenParaVirtualizedSLC3
• see: InstallingXenParaVirtualizedSLC4

Automatic startup of Xen daemon and domains

• enable Xen daemon to start automatically:

      /sbin/chkconfig --add xend
      /sbin/service xend start
      /sbin/chkconfig --add xendomains
      /sbin/service xendomains start

Management of Xen domains

• Please see XenUserGuide for information.