There's been a flurry of activity around The Man, The Myth, The Legend in the Xen Howtos section and for good reason - CentOS6 was released. It all started as a simple update to my installation tutorials but ultimately I spent half a week on it. There were some issues with how I was doing things because CentOS5 used the old Xen kernel and CentOS6 uses the new libvirt kernel. As of RHEL5/CentOS6 Xen Host (dom0) support is no longer in the kernel. However, Xen Guests (DomU) is and is handled by libvirt. Last week the last bits of Xen Dom0 support were merged into Linux Kernel 3.0. This means that going forward all Linux distributions will have Xen Dom0 ability unless the distributors remove it.
I've written and tested two xen tutorials this week.
- CentOS 6 Virtual Machine (32 bit) installation on Xen
- CentOS 6 Virtual Machine (64 bit) installation on Xen
During the process of writing these tutorials I shrunk the size of the Disk Image. I did this because I like nice small VM disk images (and sparse too) so I can duplicate them and move them around easily. It's fairly easy to resize a disk image so I updated all four tutorials on how to resize Dom0 Disk Images and Logical Volumes as well as DomU Logical Volumes and partitions. I attempted to make it clearer too what the scenario was so people would know what the tutorial was trying to accomplish.
- Resize Disk Image used as a DomU hard drive
- Resize Disk Image used as a DomU partition
- Resize Logical Volume used as a DomU hard drive
- Resize Logical Volume used as a DomU partition
As always have lots of fun and let me know if something doesn't work via the comments.