Linux Virtualization

Setting up new Xen machine on OpenSuse 11.1 using SuSe Studio

I am liking SuSe Studio quite a bit.

I’ve made a Xen server barebones OS on top of which to run xen virtual machines, and built it in SuSe Studio. Very painless process, which produces a very small download, which requires zero installation. Well not zero installation, since on initial run there needs to be some unassisted setup done by the system.
I used Imagewriter to write the raw file I got from SuSE studio to the disk. This only wrote a 1 gig file, which upon the setup that it does on first boot, turned the disk into 2 partitions. 1 partition for swap (500mb) and one partition for the OS, which turned out to be the remaining size of the disk (150 gigs). Had to pull the drive out of the server and hook it up to another PC to resize the partition, since the root partition can’t be resized if it’s the active root partition.

So anyway, everything ran well, until I tried to boot into the xen kernel. On boot the machine told me that the vlinuz image was corrupt.
What I had to eventually do is:
– First boot, the system initializes itself, and expands to fill the whole disk.
– Pull the drive out, and resize the root partition to 10 gigs.
– Put drive back into the server, and configure the network adapter.
– From the yast software management interface, remove xen, kernel-xen, and kernel-xen-base.
– Once the removal finished, install xen, kernel-xen, and kernel-xen-base.  (make sure the repository Virtualization 11.1 is set up, as it is the source of the latest xen files)
– This will add an enrty into the menu.lst . I made the new entry the default.
– Booting from that new entry will boot into the xen kernel,and all is well.
Tried re-ins

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *