Hallo zusammen, mittlerweile bin ich schon den dritten oder vierten Tag dabei und versuche eine ganz einfache Xen Installation hinzukriegen. Es ist schlicht und ergreifend ein Alptraum. Angehängt mal eine Story dazu. Es ist mir bisher nicht gelungen eine Xen domU auf 10.1 zu installieren oder gar zum Laufen zu bringen. Welche Konfiguration und welche doch sehr einfachen Anforderungen ich stelle entnehmt bitte dem Text Anhang (er ist etwas zu lang für ein Posting). Vielleicht kann ja jemand helfen oder Erfahrungen beisteuern. Wenn ich eine zweite HW Box mit Linux drauf hätte, wäre die Konfiguration nach 1 Stunde am Laufen (inklusive Installation eines SUSE Minimalsystems). Xen geschädigt, Werner Ich schreib das mal in Englisch, kann man später vielleicht mal für eine FAQ oder so verwenden. The adventure of Xen Begin the Begin At the beginning there is a simple, yet powerfull 64 bit AMD system (The System) running SUSE 10.1 and connected to the Internet with a DSL modem and dynamic IP address. The connection to the DSL modem uses an Ethernet (eth1) interface that has no IP address because its sole purpose is the hardware connection to the DSL modem. The system uses a second Ethernet interface (eth0) to connect to interal computers to form a little intranet. After setup of the DSL connection another interface appears, the "dsl0". This interface now connects the system to the big Internet. It has a public IP address and has the attribute as a point-to-point connection. This is a very common setup for today's systems. Look at the following drawing to see the connections. Neither the kids' nor the wife's computer have an Internet connection, no NAT used at all. Access to the Internet is direct via DSL modem and dsl0 interface. The most simple setup for an Internet connection using DSL. Kids' The System computer -- + +------------+ | | | +----- eth0 | Wife's | | | computer -- + | | | | DSL modem -------- eth1/dsl0 | | | +------------+ Keep in mind that eth1 does not have an IP address. If it hat one it would be useless or even dangerous because it connects to the DSL modem and dsl0 provides the real public IP address of the system as well as to point-to-point IP address (its PPPoE after all). The Idea For some testing puposes I thought it could be a good idea to have a virtual system. This would permit even some dangerous tests or tests that require two systems connected via IP. Now some systems, even my beloved SUSE, comes bundled with Xen and the promise to have installation support via YaST. I thought of the following basic setup: The System +-------------------------------------------+ Kids' | dom0 xenbr0 domU | computer -- + | +------------++---------++------------+ | | | | || || | | +--+-- eth0 || || | | Wife's | | | veth0/vif0.0 || | | computer -- + | | || || | | | | || vif1.0/eth0 | | DSL modem -----+-- eth1/dsl0 || || | | | | |+---------+| | | | +------------+ +------------+ | | | +-------------------------------------------+ Thus just having a dom0 that acts exactly the same way as before, no NAT, direct access to the Internet via DSL, no special stuff. The domU is for testing only but should have a way to communicate with dom0. Also domU shall not have a connection to the Internet. Should be pretty easy, shouldn't it? In my simple IP mind I had the following IP address setup in mind: veth0 on dom0: 192.168.10.10 eth0 on domU: 192.168.10.20 Netmask for both: 255.255.255.0 The adventure starts With this setup in mind I got a cup of coffee, started YaST and installed the XEN enabled kernel and all other packages. YaST did a wonderful job and after five minutes The System was able to run Xen. Reboot. Wonderful, no problems except that the Internet DSL dial-in was not done automatically, but just a klick on kinternet and, voila, here we are back again. I took a sip of coffee and started YaST again to install my first Xen VM. Of course I've read the pages at opensuse that deal with Xen installation, the one with the title "How to Install a VM's OS from CD" was exactly what I looked for because I use CDs to install a new system. YaST happily started, I selected "VM Management" and added a new VM. I did all the steps layed out in the description. Well, to make a long story short: that didn't work at all. No installation possible, even using the strange detach and attach procdures that are show at the opensuse Xen page didn't help. I decided to write down a bug report. I got an answer in a short time. It reads: Can you try this on SL 10.2 alpha 1 on http://www.opensuse.org and see if this is still an issue. Much has changed since SL 10.1 was released. We know this is fixed in SLES 10. They seriously aksed my to install another system, one of them even an Alpha version just to overcome a "simple" problem? I did several installations using SUSE 10.1 (a Beta and all RC versions until Gold Master). I'm not willing to to it again for the next time, also because of my other developement projects. I found another short documentation how to install on the opensuse pages and decided to give it a try. That also failed miserably. Reporting my new experiences as comment to the bug report reveals another answer: The main reason for your difficulty is that you are attempting to install your VM from CD. Unfortunately, Xen does not have good support for removable media, and therefore, a series of manual steps are required. These steps are tedious and extremely error prone. A great deal of work has gone into making this functionality more user friendly in SLES 10, but those updates did not make it into SL 10.1. As far as the manual instructions, I would recommend NOT using them. Instead, if it is at all possible, I would recommend that you setup an installation server and install your VMs from there (over a network protocol such as http or ftp). That installation method is much less error prone, and I am confident that you would find a much higher level of success. I will investigate installing a VM from CD with a fully patched SL 10.1 and post my results if I find out anything useful. Well, at least something may start to move.What made me really angry is the fact that all these installation problems and probably known bugs are not documented, no big "Alert" sign to warn innocent users. With the help of redflo (see "http://redflo.de/tiki-index.php") I managed to setup a NFS mountable directory that contains all the contents of the CDs. This is faster and probably easier than to setup servers for FTP or HTTP. The dungeons of the Xen network Using the advices of redflo and some own experiences I was able to start another installation. This time the VM starts! Well done, I thought. The YaST installer in the VM's xterm window asked the usual stuff about language, keyboard setup, installation source, choose NFS. Then the VM's YaST asks about the NFS server's IP address. Bingo - hit - I had not setup the IP address for the dom0 veth0 interface (I first tried to enter to IP address of my internal Ethernet eth0 in the hope I can cheat :-) ). And to use a NFS or any other network based installation I need the IP address of the server. Back to square one. Looking for documentation how that can be performed. Ok, after several Internet searches and looks at several Xen pages I found that I could use a Brouter solution. Seems logical at a first glance. Setting it up was quite straight forward, just a new xend script, modification of the config file and it worked. At least it seemed that way. More info can be found here: http://en.opensuse.org/Xen3_and_a_Virtual_Network Again, starting YaST, selecting and setting all disks and network addresses and off we go. The VM boots again, asking for the network server address. I gave it the address I allocated to the bridge (192.168.10.1) - no sucess, fails to contact. I even tried with TFTP - cannot contact the TFTP server at dom0. Well, the promise "you would find a much higher level of success" didn't hold after all. Moral: Xen doesn't work at all on a "out of the box" SUSE with normal DSL configuration. Caveat The normal Xen scripts _always_ require that the system has an Ethernet connection to the Internet. A point-to-point (PPPoE) interface doesn't work. Such a setup seems to confuse Xen network setup completly. This is why I copied over the Brouter script. I don't want this automatic exchange of eth0, peth0, veth0. Such an automatism is bullshit to say the least. Only the administrator shall decide which interfaces are used for which purpose. Thus IMO _switch off_ this automatic renaming stuff and _require_ a configuration step before Xen install an start. Such a step should be very well documented and shall describe several configurations. -- Um die Liste abzubestellen, schicken Sie eine Mail an: suse-linux-unsubscribe@suse.com Um eine Liste aller verfuegbaren Kommandos zu bekommen, schicken Sie eine Mail an: suse-linux-help@suse.com