Hello,
My current project involves putting together a Eucalyptus mini-cloud so that we
can evaluate it. I don''t have access to hardware that supports KVM, so
I have been trying to get Xen working with my Ubuntu installations.
I have no prior experience with GNU/Linux in general (we are making the
transition from Windows to support this, so really no one on site has this
background either). For a neophyte everything is pretty opaque.
Nonetheless I have now spent about 1 full week reading documentation and forum
postings and attempting to get a Xen capable Dom0 kernel up and going and have
been trying to start VMs with xm create (following a template I found for the
config file on the Eucalyptus users site). I''ve been trying to use the
pv-ops kernel from the xen/master branch, following instructions I found here:
http://bderzhavets.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/setup-xen-3-4-1-dom0-on-top-of-ubuntu-9-04-server-via-marc-a-dahlhauss-udev-patch/
I successfully compiled it and Xen 3.4 itself. I set up a new grub menu.lst
entry:
title Xen 3.4 / Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.31.1
uuid b37xxxxx etc
kernel /xen-3.4.gz
module /vmlinuz-2.6.31.1 root=/dev/mapper/ubuntu--node--2-root ro console=tty0
max_loop=200
module /initrd-2.6.31.1.img
But when I boot from this it behaves very strangely, e.g. the username /
password screen crashes and/or I have to enter my username / password several
times. Eventually I can get into Ubuntu (so far), but then various other things
don''t seem to be functioning (X11 randomly crashes, for instance). I
have an Ubuntu VM image that I obtained from the Eucalyptus web site,
specifically for Xen (it is based on the 2.6.27.21 kernel). I created a
test_dom config file from a template I found on the Eucalyptus users forum.
So forging ahead, I then execute: xm create test_dom
It then replies:
Started domain ExampleDomain (id=1)
However, xm list then indicates only Domain-0 and /var/log/xen/xend.log
indicates:
ERROR (XendDomainInfo:2012) VM ExampleDomain restarting too fast (Elapsed time:
4.028942 seconds). Refusing to restart to avoid loops.
The Eucalyptus forum also indicates that it should be possible to start this VM
with virsh. But when I execute virsh version:
Connecting to uri: qemu:///system
Compiled against library: libvir 0.6.1
Using library:: libvir 0.6.1
Using API: QEMU 0.6.1
error: failed to get the hypervisor version
error: Unknown failure
Attempting to start with virsh create it fails immediately with an error
indicating basically that xen isn''t known.
I''ve tried a few other supposedly Dom0 compatible kernels I found from
various places, but in each case Xen simply doesn''t seem to be
correctly set up some how and Ubuntu is flaky in various ways.
I thought I would now try to go through this procedure one more time with
patches from Andrew Lyon and rebuild the 2.6.31.4 kernel (assuming I can figure
out the makeconfig parameters). But as none of the attempts so far have been
successful, I''m not optimistic.
Is it the case that I need to apply Xen patches to the kernel and then apply
some sort of Ubuntu patches? Clearly Ubuntu seems unhappy with the vanilla
kernels that I have built.
Most likely I have simply got myself into something I shouldn''t have,
and there is some much easier way somehow to make this all work, I''m
just missing it.
What do people recommend for someone like me just trying to get something going?
Thanks,
-Eric
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