CentOS 5 Xen Installation

The following tutorial describes the process of installing and getting Xen virtualization up and running on your CentOS 5 machine. The following tutorial assumes the following:

1. You installed CentOS 5 and performed a security hardening procedure before deploying the machine into production.
2. You have applied the latest patches and bug fixes.

Note: If you are installing Xen on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 the following two tasks must be performed before you can grab the virtualization packages.

1. Register the system using rhn_register.
2. Navigate to http://redhat.com/ and sign into manage your systems.
3. Locate the system you registered and edit the "System Properties". You should see a check box for "Virtualization", click it and hit update properties. This will entitle the box to the Xen Virtualization packages.

Next we need to get the Xen kernel and hypervisor installed.

yum -y install xen kernel-xen

The command above should allow yum to resolve any package dependencies and install the lastest Xen kernel and hypervisor.

We then need to reboot the system and tell it to use the Xen-kernel. You can simply reboot and select it from the grub menu.

Once the system is up and running we can verify we are running the latest Xen kernel by issuing:

uname -a

You should see something similar:

Linux xen.localhost.localdomain 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5xen #1 SMP Wed Jul 23 04:25:48 EDT 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Xen has now been installed on your server you can start creating Xen guests now