On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 8:11 PM, Peter <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 03/16/2015 11:25 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote: >> I've got CentOS VM's running fine, and have done them before. But >> previously, I deployed the same base OS on the VM as on the Xen >> server, so paravirtualization posed few risks. And I had control of >> the DHCP setup. so I could trivially set up a tftp server to do a >> non-CD installation, because Xen, at last look, doesn't support >> installing a paravirtualized host from a CD image. > > It does as long as (1) the kernel has Xen PV support (CentOS 6 standard > kernel does) and (2) it has the necessary drivers in the initrd (I think > this is where the CD image is lacking), then you should, in theory, be > able to pv-grub boot to the CD. Alternatively you can boot to the CD on Not according to the Xen guidelines I was finding. If they're incorrect, *for a CentOS 5 Xen hypervisor*, I'd love to be able to use that. Unfortunately, one of the banes of my technology existence is when people say "that works great!" and "just look on Google,!", and the answer they vaguely remember does not actually include the situation I desdcribed. > another box first, copy the kernel off to a USB stick, and generate a > new initrd with the xen drivers included, then put those on the Xen host > and boot to the VM CD image using those in the kernel= and initrd= lines > in the domain.cfg file. Ouch. I've hand-modified CD and DVD images in the past, it's a pain the neck, It's been compunded by the insistece that the compressed "vmlinuz" file is, itself, named "vmlinuz" instead of "vmlinuz.gz", which always struck me as fairly nutty. > The other way is to boot to the CD as an HVM domain and install, then > convert it to a PV domain afterwards, which is not all that difficult to do. This would probably be safest for me right now, since I have a testable HVM instance of CentOS 6 to copy and work with. I'm not finding any good guidelines for migrating from HVM to paravirtualizaton for old Xen environments. Have you seen any, or done this process? The notes I find often include extraneous and hopefully unnecessary steps, such as http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX121875 saying. It's legible, but leaves out the kind of incompatibility issues that I;ve been concerned about hopping from a Xen server on CentOS 5.x to a CentOS 6.x guest. > There is a third way which involves using yum to install the @core group > plus kernel to an image, then tweak and boot to that as a PV domain. > This is how I have done it in the past. I'm sorry, but what? Are you building a chroot cage yourself, such as using 'mock', or are you starting with someone else's working para-virtualized image? (See my notes above). >> So I'm right back to my effectively unanswered original questions. So >> please: I asked a very specific pair of questions, and they remain >> unanswered. CentOS 5 Xen server (hypervisor, or Dom0, whatever we want >> to call it this week): Does CentOS 6 work, paravirtualized, on such a >> server? > > Yes, I have done that until I upgraded the CentOS 5 host to CentOS 6 a > couple years ago. Thanks! THAT is one of the questions I really wanted an answer for. >> And given my deployment issues, does anyone have a base OS >> image I can get a copy of? > > Sorry my image templates that I use are highly customized for my own > work, but I have told you three different ways to accomplish it above. Well, dang! _______________________________________________ CentOS-virt mailing list CentOS-virt@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-virt
