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The New Xen
The new and easier look of Xen that also supports Windows operating systems including Windows Vista over a Linux host machine
Anindya Roy
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
I still remember when, for the first time, we covered Xen in 2005. It was a
lengthy two-page article with lots of text-based commands and configuration file
modifications. At the end of it we could just virtualize different flavors of
Linux and could not support Windows-based OSs. But, today, things have changed.
Now, installing and running Windows Vista or 2003 is just a 5 or 6 click job. In
this article we will tell you how you can do that with Fedora 7 and a processor
with VT (Virtualization Technology) support.
As windows installation over Xen is only possible in Full Virtualization mode
where the guest machine bypasses the host machine and directly interacts with
the hardware, a standard Core 2 Duo or a quad Core is perfect for such kind of
virtualization. Now the next step will be to install Fedora 7. If you don't have
Fedora 7 then need not worry, as OpenSuSE and SuSE Linux Enterprise Edition SP1
are also capable of doing windows virtualization over Xen. But while installing
the OS make sure you select the Virtualization option and install the Xen
Kernel. Once installed you should boot the machine with the Xen Kernel.
Now let's go through a step-by-step guide and see how easy it is to install
Windows 2003 on top of Xen. You can also follow the same method to install
Windows Vista, XP or 2000. In this article we will see how to run Windows on Xen
for Fedora 7. Fedora 7 is also carried with this month's PCQXtreme DVD as a
bootable distro. So nothing is stopping you from doing a dry run of Xen with
Windows.
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| To begin, go to Applications menu>System
Tools>Virtual Machine Manager. This opens up the window. Click on the File
menu and select the 'New Machine' option |
In the dialogue box fill the name of the
virtual machine you are going to create; make sure there is no space between
the words, else the system will give you errors |
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| Select the type of virtualization you want to
do. For virtualizing Windows you need to select the second option which says
'Full Virtualization' |
Select the path from where Xen reads the
installation media, type of OS and Variant. Here it is CD-ROM, Windows and
Windows 2003/Vista respectively |
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| Either select a physical hard disk device
from the first option or specify a path for the file which will contain the
virtual hard disk in the second option |
From here you can either go with the default
virtual network by selecting the first option or select a physical spare
network adapter from the second option |
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| Set the amount of Max and startup RAM the
virtual machine will use. Also select the number of processors/cores the
virtual machine will use |
The installation of windows will begin. Once
the installation is done you can get your Windows 2003 machine running
dedicatedly on a core over your Xen |
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