Installation guide

Chapter 14. Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 as a Xen guest
on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
This chapter describes the installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 as a Xen guest on a Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5 host, both as para-virtualizaed and fully virtualized.
14.1. Inst alling Red Hat Ent erprise Linux 6 as a Xen para-virt ualized
guest on Red Hat Ent erprise Linux 5
This section describes how to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 as a Xen para-virtualized guest on
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Para-virtualization is only available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 hosts.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 uses the PV-opts features of the Linux kernel to appear as a compatible
Xen para-virtualized guest.
Important
Para-virtualization only works with the Xen hypervisor. Para-virtualization does not work with
the KVM hypervisor. This procedure is for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 or newer.
14 .1.1. Using virt -inst all
This section covers creating a Xen para-virtualized Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 guest on a Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5 host using the virt-install command. For instructions on virt-manager,
see the procedure in Section 14.1.2, “ Using virt-manager” .
Guests can be created with the command line virt-install tool. This method installs Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 6 from a remote server hosting the network installation tree. The installation
instructions presented in this section are similar to installing from the minimal installation live CD-
ROM.
Pro ced u re 14 .1. Creat in g a Xen p ara- virt u aliz ed Red Hat En t erp rise Lin u x 6 g u est wit h
virt -in st all
1. Creat e t h e gu est wit h t h e virt-install co mman d
In this example, the name of the guest is rhel6pv-64, the disk image file is rhel6pv-64.img and a
local mirror of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 installation tree is
http://example.com/installation_tree/RHEL6-x86/.
Replace these values with values for your system and network, and use the following
commands to create the guest:
# virt-install --name=rhel6pv-64 \
--disk path=/var/lib/xen/images/rhel6pv-64.img,size=6,sparse=false \
--graphics spice --paravirt --vcpus=2 --ram=2048 \
--location=http://example.com/installation_tree/RHEL6-x86/
⁠Chapt er 1 4 . Inst alling Red Hat Ent erprise Linux 6 as a Xen guest o n Red Hat Ent erprise Linux 5
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