After a few tribulations, I was able to convert a RH EL 5 HVM domU guest into a
para virtual guest. Actually, I cloned the HVM guest as a para virtual guest.
I stated with RH EL 5 with the virtualization RPMs installed. This was Xen 3.0.3
as I recall.
I use logical volumes for my Xen guest disk space.
I used virt-manager to attempt to kick start an HVM guest. I had difficulty
getting the kickstart devices to align with the HVM config and ultimately edited
the /etc/xen/CONFIG file to have
the appropriate devices and cdrom iso file reference and then used
xm create /etc/xen/CONFIG
to boot the install media. I followed my normal hardware kick start procedure
and ended
up with a RHEL5 installation. The install disk was /dev/vg/CONFIG
which was a partitioned drive.
For the ParaVM, I wanted the logical volume to be a directly mountable file
system as this approach is needed for my pre-existing Xen management tool set.
So I used fdisk (sfdisk?) to find the first byte of hda1 and then used
losetup -o FIRSTBYTE -f
to define a loop back device
mount /dev/loopX /mnt/CONFIG
create a compressed tarball of the image
tar -C /mnt/CONFIG -cjf /xen/templates/CONFIGtarball.tz2 .
there was some noise re sockets.
umount -d /mnt/CONFIG
define a new logical volume
/dev/vg/NEW
of the desired resulting size
make the desired file sys on /dev/vg/NEW
and then
mount /dev/vg/NEW /mnt/NEW
tar -C /mnt/NEW -xjf /xen/templages/CONFIGtarball.tz2
EDIT any configuration values in the system image such as IP address
umount /mnt/NEW
xm create NEW -c
Clone a new config file, NEW, from CONFIG:
a. remove the HVM builder reference
b. assign a new uuid
c. a new name for the instance
d. a new MAC address ... low bit of first byte must be ZERO
e. change the disk reference to /dev/hda1 and the /dev/vg/NEW
device
f. Specify the kernel and initrd files .... I used the dom0
xen kernel and initrd.
OOOPs ... I couldn''t get the boot to finish...
Eventually, I downloaded ELRH5 RPMs for Xen3.1 from the xensource site ....
Played remove / fix dependancy games and forced the new kernel install
Edited the /boot/grub/menu.1st file to specify and activate the new kernel
and xen hypervisor.
Now the the ParaVM guest boots and appears operational ... limited testing thus
far.
And the VNC mouse issues in my windows XP HVM are less obnoxious ... not perfect
yet.
This is of course an outline so I may have missed something I repaired in the
heat of the moment, but hopefully, this will provide the guidance someone else
needs.
Dave Morris
_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xensource.com
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users