This is an old revision of the document!
Table of Contents
Installing Xen on a Debian Wheezy Host
All information in the guide was taken from the following link: XenProject PV Guest tutorial
Enable Virtualization Support in BIOS
The virtualization option appears differently in different BIOS builds but generally it is referred to as “Enable Virtualisation Technology” or “Enable Intel VT” for Intel chipsets, however in some cases it can be listed as “Vanderpool Technology”. Oftentimes this option can be found under the “Advanced Chipset Features” menu in the BIOS. Similar also for AMD.
Install Debian
Download the netinst image from the following link: http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-cd/
Partition the disk as follows:
sda1 - /boot 250MB sda2 - / 15GB sda3 - swap sda4 - reserved for LVM
Configure LVM for Guest Storage
apt-get install lvm2 pvcreate /dev/sda4 vgcreate vg0 /dev/sda4
Set up Linux bridge for guest networking
apt-get install bridge-utils
Edit /etc/network/interfaces to look as follows IOT create a bridge:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet manual
auto xenbr0
iface xenbr0 inet dhcp
bridge_ports eth0
This is the same as doing:
brctl addbr xenbr0 brctl addif xenbr0 eth0 dhclient xenbr0
Install the Xen Hypervisor
Install the hypervisor and xen-tools (xm).
Once Complete, configure grub to boot the hypervisor before the debian OS.
apt-get install xen-linux-system xen-tools dpkg-divert --divert /etc/grub.d/08_linux_xen --rename /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen update-grub
Create and Manage Guests
It is possible to create guests on the command line as follows, however it will be best to modify the xen config file
/etc/xen-tools/xen-tools.conf for server creation.
After updating xen-tools.conf with the config posted below, create and connect to a new guest using xen-create-image.
xen-create-image --hostname=tutorial-pv-guest \ --vcpus=2 \ --pygrub \ xm create -c /etc/xen/tutorial-pv-guest.cfg #xm create /etc/xen/tutorial-pv-guest.cfg && xm console tutorial-pv-guest xm shutdown tutorial-pv-guest
- xen-tools.conf
test
