Comments on Virtualization With Xen On Debian Lenny (AMD64)

Virtualization With Xen On Debian Lenny (AMD64) This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen on a Debian Lenny (5.0) system (AMD64). Xen lets you create guest operating systems (*nix operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called "virtual machines" or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other (e.g. a virtual machine for a mail server, a virtual machine for a high-traffic web site, another virtual machine that serves your customers' web sites, a virtual machine for DNS, etc.), but still use the same hardware. This saves money, and what is even more important, it's more secure. If the virtual machine of your DNS server gets hacked, it has no effect on your other virtual machines. Plus, you can move virtual machines from one Xen server to the next one.

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By: Ian

Hi Falko,

Thanks for the howto. Sadly I did not get past the reboot in stage 2 

The minor problem was  that I have my boot partition on RAID-1, which confuses GRUB, so I had to edit (hd1,0) into (hd0.0) to get it to boot at all.

The more serious problem is that the new kernel cannot load the NVIDIA drivers for my graphics card. And in trying to purge the old drivers and install again, I have got myself into the situation where none of the kernels will load X, the driver install script demands gcc-4.1 which is installed, but it can't find it.

I rather suspect a complete reformat and reinstall is coming on

Ian

 

By: WillyFoG

Hi Ian!

 The problem you had with the nvidia driver is very common, and very easy to solve.

The only thing you have to do is a symbolic link from gcc to gcc-4.1. By default this link points to gcc-4.3, if I'm not in a mistake.

 

Cheers

 WillyFoG

By: Anonymous

nice article!

It would be nice to see one specific to the intel architecture too!

Also, if you have an example of  moving an image to another machine -

Thanks!

By: x-point

just a note: the architecture is called amd64, but it also run on intel 64 bit-enabled processors....

By: Boris

I believe there should a way to backport Xen 3.3.X Hypervisor to Debian Lenny. Something similar backport Intrepid Xen 3.3 Hypervisor to Ubuntu Hardy Dom0.

By: skug67

OK, so maybe I'm getting greedy, but the easiest way for me to keep everything up-to-date in my DomU's is to use pygrub and let the kernel get automatically updated there, rather than having to update the kernel reference in the xen configuration file.  But when the DomU is jaunty (which doesn't provide a xen-compatible kernel), that means a mixed system which seems to be giving poor apt-get fits.  I've been able to get to a stable situation where the only packages actually sourced from Debian are the kernel and kernel module files.  And I've set up pinning in /etc/apt/preferences so that only the kernel and module files can come from Debian.   But nevertheless when I add the Debian repositories back into /etc/apt/sources.list.d it seems to think that anything appearing in both Debian and Ubuntu repositories has come from the Debian repos, so that it tries to update them to get them sourced from Ubuntu.  And it will try to do this endlessly.

 Obviously, I can solve this problem by enabling the Debian repos only long enough to check for kernel updates and then disabling them again.  But it seems like there should be a better solution.  Any thoughts?

 TIA,

 Seth Green