I hoping a Xen guru that uses openSUSE for domain0 can help me.
I am very new to Xen, though been with openSUSE for a number of years. I decided to give Xen a try, as I would like to have normal openSUSE server, experimental openSUSE server and experimental WinK3 server on the same hardware. Already checked that my hardware is VT capable for Win2K3.
From what I have read, domain0 is supposed to be just used for the hypervisor and it’s tools, thus thinking of installing minimum base plus LXDE, yet default runlevel is 3. (I am not a command line warrior, so need a little gui help here and there).
One domainU guest with be a fully fledged Gnome environment, and be the largest guest of them all. Smaller guests for experimental openSUSE and Win2K3. Each guest will have it’s own hard drives (virtual disks by RAID controller), thus no image files will be used.
What is the best way of setting up Xen by using openSUSE? First have a working openSUSE installation (minimum base + LXDE) with correct network configuration, then install Xen? Or, do the installation of Xen with openSUSE installation?
Is there anything special I should be aware of for setting up Xen and the guests?
Keep in mind that, unless things have changed, you cannot run Xen with
proprietary graphics drivers so that may not work well for you, but if
you’re runing with LXDE or command-line only then that’s not a big deal.
With regard to networking I believe Yast can now manipulate all of that
stuff. The systems I’ve setup started out as Xen servers (I chose the Xen
pattern from the start, along with the minimal installs plus some other
desired packages) and that seems to work well now. I keep my dom0 as
clean as possible like you mentioned and then do all of the work (aside
from downloading install ISOs and such) in the domUs.
Paravirt is faster. Introduces some risks should things fail badly in the
VM, but I’ve never heard of that happening. I think 99.999% of everybody
uses paravirt whenever possible.
I need additional help in getting a working openSuse 11.4 Xen solution.
I have a system with HDD that has 2 partitions, one for /boot and the other being LVM. On the LVM, I created 2 Logical Volumes (LVs) for the host openSuse 11.4 and it’s swap. Rest of LVM is unallocated space.
Now I want to setup a openSuse 11.4 guest installation, with LV also for /home for user’s data.
I trying to use the YaST tool Create Virtual Machines to do the job, yet can’t figure out how to configure the summary page in order for openSuse 11.4 installation to see the LVM to create the needed LVs.