Designing High-Availability for Xen Virtual Machines with HP Serviceguard for Linux

You can use the command ‘yast2’ (on SLES10) or ‘rpm’ (on RHEL5) to install additional

rpms required for Xen.

These rpms are :

• ‘python’

• ‘python-virtinst’

• ‘libvirt’

• ‘bridge-utils’

• ‘libvirt-python’

• ‘dnsmasq’

• ‘xen-libs’

• ‘xen’

• ‘kernel-xen’

Xen is added to the GRUB configuration. The installation process places an entry in

‘/boot/grub/menu.lst’. This entry should be similar to the following:

title Xen2

kernel (hd0,0)/boot/xen.gz dom0_mem=458752

module (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz-xen <parameters>

module (hd0,0)/boot/initrd-xen

Reboot the machine to boot from Xen kernel. This sets up the Xen Host (or Domain 0) for

SLES10/RHEL5- Xen.

You can use console client ‘virt-install’ or Linux GUI client‘virt-manager’ can to

install client VMs on the domain0.

Refer to the Xen User Manual [4] for installation, configuration and administration details for

Xen.

Xen Dom0 Installation and Configuration on HP Integrity Server

platforms

Only RHEL5 supports Xen on HP Integrity Server (Integrity) platforms. Be aware that during

Serviceguard testing, there was at least one instance of a kernel panic related to Xen. This

problem is not seen on x86_64 platforms. A bugzilla is filed for the issue at

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=457537. In such an instance Serviceguard

will fail over any protected guests.

Novell SUSE10 SP1, SP2 does not support the HP Integrity Server platform. Until Novell

supports HP Integrity Server it cannot be supported with SG/LX.

Before installing Xen on Integrity platforms read the whitepaper “Xen-Based Virtualization

Technology Preview for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 on HP Integrity servers” [7] and follow

the recommendations given in the current paper.

By default, the hypervisor on Integrity systems reserves only 512 MB of memory for the dom0

instance. Dom0 will be allocated only one virtual CPU by default. The default value for

memory and CPU must be increased to prevent delays under heavy load. A recommended

value of 1 GB memory and 2 virtual CPUs for Dom0 is optimum.