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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

Be sure to install sudo, vim, and tcpdump. Add the user to sudo group.

   apt-get install sudo, vim, tcpdump
   usermod -a -G sudo <user>

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

Update the xen config file /etc/xen-tools/xen-tools.conf prior to creating vm's on the cmd line. Also, be sure to uncomment line 146: # (network-script network-bridge) of /etc/xen/xend-confix.sxp.

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