Installation guide

Note
If you are installing a new guest system, in order to gain maximal benefit from the para-
virtualized block device drivers, you should create the guest with at least two disks.
Using the para-virtualized drivers for the disk that contains the MBR and the boot loader
(GRUB), and for the /boot partition. This partition can be very small, as it only needs to have
enough capacity to hold the /boot partition.
Use the second disk and any additional disks for all other partitions (for example, /, /usr) or
logical volumes.
Using this installation method, when the para-virtualized block device drivers are later
installed after completing the install of the guest, only booting the guest and accessing the
/boot partition will use the virtualized block device drivers.
12.3.1. Common inst allat ion st eps
The list below covers the high level steps common across all guest operating system versions.
1. Copy the RPMs for your hardware architecture to a suitable location in your guest operating
system. Your home directory is sufficient. If you do not know which RPM you require verify
against the table at Section 12.2, “ Para-virtualization Restrictions and Support”.
2. Use the rpm command or the yum command to install the packages. The rpm utility will install
the following four new kernel modules into /lib/modules/[%kversion]
[%kvariant]/extra/xenpv/%release:
the PCI infrastructure module, xen_platform_pci.ko,
the ballooning module, xen_balloon.ko,
the virtual block device module, xen_vbd.ko,
and the virtual network device module, xen_vnif.ko.
3. If the guest operating does not support automatically loading the para-virtualized drivers (for
example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3) perform the required post-install steps to copy the
drivers into the operating system specific locations.
4. Shut down your guest operating system.
5. Reconfigure the guest operating system's configuration file on the host to use the installed
para-virtualized drivers.
6. Remove the “ type=ioemu” entry for the network device.
7. Add any additional disk partitions, volumes or LUNs to the guest so that they can be
accessed via the para-virtualized (xen-vbd) disk driver.
8. For each physical device, LUN, partition or volume you want to use the para-virtualized
drivers you must edit the disk entry for that device in the libvirt configuration file.
9. A typical disk entry resembles the following:
⁠Chapt er 1 2 . Xen Para- virt ualiz ed Drivers
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