############################### __ __ ____ ___ \ \/ /___ _ __ |___ \ / _ \ \ // _ \ '_ \ __) || | | | / \ __/ | | | / __/ | |_| | /_/\_\___|_| |_| |_____(_)___/ ############################### University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory 3 November 2004 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/netos/xen/ What is Xen? ============ Xen is a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) originally developed by the Systems Research Group of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, as part of the UK-EPSRC funded XenoServers project. Xen is freely-distributable Open Source software, released under the GNU GPL. The 2.0 release offers excellent performance, hardware support and enterprise-grade features such as live migration. Linux 2.6, 2.4 and NetBSD 2.0 are already available for Xen, with more operating system ports on the way. This file contains some quick-start instructions to install Xen on your system. For full documentation, see the Xen User Manual. If this is a pre-built release then you can find the manual at: dist/install/usr/share/doc/xen/pdf/user.pdf If you have a source release, then 'make -C docs' will build the manual at docs/pdf/user.pdf. Quick-Start Guide - Pre-Built Binary Release ============================================ [NB. Unless noted otherwise, all the following steps should be performed with root privileges.] 1. Install the binary distribution onto your filesystem: # sh ./install.sh Amongst other things, this will install Xen and XenLinux kernel files in /boot, kernel modules and Python packages in /lib, and various control tools in standard 'bin' directories. 2. Configure your bootloader to boot Xen and an initial Linux virtual machine. Note that Xen currently only works with GRUB: less common alternatives such as LILO are *not* supported. You can most likely find your GRUB menu file at /boot/grub/menu.lst: edit this file to include an entry like the following: # title Xen 2.0 / XenLinux 2.6 # kernel /boot/xen-2.0.gz dom0_mem= console=vga # module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6-xen0 root= ro console=tty0 For you should specify the amount of memory, in kilobytes, to allocate for use by your initial XenLinux virtual machine. Note that Xen itself reserves about 32MB memory for internal use, which is not available for allocation to virtual machines. For , specify your usual root partition (e.g., /dev/hda1). 3. Reboot your system and select the "Xen 2.0 / XenLinux 2.6" menu option. After booting Xen, XenLinux will start and your initialisation scripts should execute in the usual way. Quick-Start Guide - Source Release ================================== First, there are a number of prerequisites for building a Xen source release. Make sure you have all the following installed, either by visiting the project webpage or installing a pre-built package provided by your Linux distributor: * GCC (preferably v3.2.x or v3.3.x; older versions are unsupported) * GNU Make * GNU Binutils * Development install of libcurl (e.g., libcurl-dev) * Development install of zlib (e.g., zlib-dev) * Development install of Python v2.2 or later (e.g., python-dev) [NB. Unless noted otherwise, all the following steps should be performed with root privileges.]