Concepts in the Paradox

I’ve started my work toward learning more about the open source virtualization software known as Xen. My target is Xen 3.0, or Xen-unstable as it is called, which I will evetually deploy as a production system at work.

Here is where I am at so far:

OpenSuSE 10 RC1’s packages don’t work properly. This is unfortunate, because I work at a Novell shop. The problem I am having are:

1. While the Xen kernel is installed at booting, new domains hang

2. Stopping a hung DomU hangs xend
3. Only rebooting clears hung DomU’s from memory

This is a problem dealing with both the OpenSuSE yast2 created images and from pulling a SLES9 image from the imaging server. I’m going to try QEMU packages from FreeOsZoo next.

Giving up on OpenSuSE for now, I pulled down Fedora Core 4 with updated Xen packages. The main bug here is that Xend doesn’t work out of the box; you’ll have to make some magical directories in /var for it to start up, otherwise it’ll go on and on about a missing file or directory.

mkdir /var/run/xenstore /var/lib/xenstore

I’m glad I archive the xen-users mailing list. Grep is my friend. The Wiki is useful too.

The next step is to try to bring up a DomU once I pull down my SLES9 image again. If it works in FC4, then I’ll play in FC4 until the next milestone in OpenSuSE is out and about or try and fail again to pull xen-unstable from cvs.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 19th, 2005 at 11:06 pm and is filed under xen, sles, linux, geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.