Xen-Project | Bots!

Welcome to Getting started with Xen Virtualization On CentOS 7.x. Xen is an open-source bare-metal hypervisor which allows you to run different operating systems in parallel on a single host machine. This type of hypervisor is normally referred to as a hypervisortype 1 in Virtualization world.

Meltdown and Spectre Mitigation on Xen 6.5 and Xen 7.x

Xen is used as a basis for Server virtualization, Desktop virtualization, Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and embedded/hardware appliances. The ability of physical host system to run multiple guest VMs can vastly improve the utilization of the underlying hardware.

Cutting-edge features of Xen hypervisor

Xen is operating system agnostic – Main control stack (domain 0) can be Linux, NetBSD, OpenSolaris e.t.c
Driver Isolation capability – Xen can allow the main device driver for a system to run inside of a virtual machine. The VM can be rebooted in case of driver failure/crash without affecting the rest of the system.
Paravirtualization support: This allows fully paravirtualized guests to run much faster as compared to a fully virtualized guest using hardware virtualization extensions (HVM).

INSTALLING A GUEST DOMAIN (“DOMU”)

Now that the Xen hypervisor/Dom0 virtual machine is configured and up and running, it’s time to configure and create a DomU. Just like we did in the Debian 9 tutorial, we will now install and use the xen-tools package to automate the steps involved in creating a paravirtualized (“PV”) DomU.

INSTALL DEBIAN PACKAGE XEN-TOOLS

Use apt-get to update the Xen hypervisor/Dom0 package index files, and upgrade all currently installed packages. As root run the following command:

# apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Next, use apt-get to install the xen-tools package from the Debian stretch repository, which is currently shipping xen-tools version 4.8-1. Run the following command as root:

# apt-get install xen-tools

SET UP NEW PARTITION AND VOLUME GROUP

Before we use xen-tools to create a new DomU, we need to create a LVM volume group which will be used to provision disk space for new virtual machines. In this step, we assume Dom0 was installed on the /dev/sda1 partition of your primary disk drive, and that all other /dev/sda drive space is empty.