[xen-tools-discuss] What can I run Xen 4.0 on?

[Dmitry Nedospasov]

Hey Mike,

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 07:41:28PM +1000, Mike Bailey wrote:
> I've been using Xen on Ubuntu 8.04 but cannot get it working on 10.04.
> 
> What Distro/Version do people recommend I use to run Xen 4.0?

Depending on how "production" your deployment is, you might want to run
xen 3.4 over 4.0. From my experience, the best distro to get xen 3.4 up
and running is CentOS 5.5 [1] with the gitco xen repositories [2].

[1] http://www.centos.org/ 
[2] http://www.gitco.de/repo/

Installing xen-tools is also a breeze, though you might need to enable
the RHEL repositories to get git, so that you can install directly from
our upstream [3].

[3] http://gitorious.org/xen-tools/xen-tools

If you're planning to run xen 4.0, then by far the easiest way to get
4.0 up and running is Debian 6.0 Squeeze (testing) [4][5].

[4] http://www.debian.org
[5] http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/xen-linux-system-2.6.32-5-xen-amd64

The only caveat here, is that since Squeeze is still in testing, there
is no reliable installer. My favorite way of installing Debian squeeze
is creating a Finnix [6] bootable USB drive, and using debootstrap.

[6] http://www.finnix.org/

Just don't forget setting that arch flag because otherwise debootsrap
will default to 32 bit (i.e. --arch amd64) because finnix runs a 32-bit
userspace. After squeeze is up and running just install
xen-linux-system, xen-utils and xen-tools.  Xen-tools is almost as up to
date as you can get on squeeze, so thats probably the best support you
can get xen-tools-wise.

Anyway, hope that helps!

All the best,

D.
-- 
Dmitry Nedospasov <dmitry at nedos.net> -- Twitter: @nedos
Web: http://nedos.net -- Github: http://github.com/nedos