Divyen Patel's Weblog

Lets begin with the installation of xVM Hypervisor on OpenSolaris 2008.11.

You can follow exact steps mentioned on Dileep Kumar’s blog – “How to create domU in OpenSolaris 2008.05“. These steps are also valid for OpenSolaris 2008.11.

Once dom0 is up and running, walk through the below given steps to create a fully virtualized ubuntu 9.04 DomU. Fully virtualized DomU is also known as HVM Domain (Hardware-assisted Virtual Machine Domain), with that you can run unmodified guest operating system without the knowledge of underlying hypervisor.

Step-1: Download and save ubuntu 9.04 ISO file at /ubuntu-hvm

mkdir /ubuntu-hvm
cd /ubuntu-hvm
wget http://ftp.ucsb.edu/pub/mirrors/linux/ubuntu/jaunty/ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso

Step-2: Create a virtual Disk for the guest domain.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/ubuntu-hvm/ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.img bs=1k seek=10000k count=1

Step-3: Create guest configuration file install.py with following script at /ubuntu-hvm

Detailed explanation on each lines used in the script is given here.

disk = ['file:/ubuntu-hvm/ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.img,hda,w','file:/ubuntu-hvm/ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso,hdc:cdrom,r']
memory = 1024
vcpus=1
name = "ubuntu-904-hvm-install"
kernel = "/usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader"
builder='hvm'
vif = [ '' ]
on_poweroff = 'destroy'
on_reboot   = 'destroy'
on_crash    = 'destroy'
boot='dc'
vnc=1
sdl=0
vncdisplay=5
import os, re
arch = os.uname()[4]
if re.search('64', arch):
arch_libdir = 'lib64'
else:
arch_libdir = 'lib'
device_model = '/usr/' + arch_libdir + '/xen/bin/qemu-dm'

Launch the guest domain to begin the installation.

cd /ubuntu-hvm/
xm create install.py

Bring up VNC Session to proceed with the installation. In the install.py script we specified to bind VNC on port 127.0.0.1:5

vncviewer 127.0.0.1:5

If HVM guest is unsupported on your system, you may see following error message.
Error: HVM guest support is unavailable: is VT/AMD-V supported by your CPU and enabled in your BIOS?

Step-4: Install guest domain.

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Do not click on the restart. Follow step-5 instead.

Step-5: Destroy the guest domain and create new configuration file to boot the domU from the disk image.

xm destroy ubuntu-904-hvm-install
cd /ubuntu-hvm/

Create new configuration file “domu.py” with following script at /ubuntu-hvm

disk = ['file:/ubuntu-hvm/ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.img,hda,w']
memory = 1024
vcpus=1
name = "ubuntu-904-hvm-guest"
kernel = "/usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader"
builder='hvm'
vif = [ '' ]
on_poweroff = 'destroy'
on_reboot   = 'destroy'
on_crash    = 'destroy'
boot='c'
vnc=1
sdl=0
vncdisplay=5
import os, re
arch = os.uname()[4]
if re.search('64', arch):
arch_libdir = 'lib64'
else:
arch_libdir = 'lib'
device_model = '/usr/' + arch_libdir + '/xen/bin/qemu-dm'

Step-6: Finally launch the HVM guest domain

cd /ubuntu-hvm/
xm create domu.py

Bring up VNC Session

vncviewer 127.0.0.1:5

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