Installing Xen on Fedora 20

I’ve written about installing Xen on Fedora 19 and earlier versions on this blog before. Let’s tackle it on Fedora 20.

Start with the Xen hypervisor and the basic toolset first:

yum -y install xen xen-hypervisor xen-libs xen-runtime
systemctl enable xend.service
systemctl enable xendomains.service

Get GRUB2 in order:

# grep ^menuentry /boot/grub2/grub.cfg | cut -d "'" -f2
Fedora, with Linux 3.13.4-200.fc20.x86_64
Fedora, with Linux 0-rescue-c9dcecb251df472fbc8b4e620a749f6d
Fedora, with Xen hypervisor
# grub2-set-default 'Fedora, with Xen hypervisor'
# grub2-editenv list
saved_entry=Fedora, with Xen hypervisor
# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Now reboot. When the server restarts, verify that Xen is running:

# xm dmesg | head
 __  __            _  _    _____  _    ___    __      ____   ___
 \ \/ /___ _ __   | || |  |___ / / |  / _ \  / _| ___|___ \ / _ \
  \  // _ \ '_ \  | || |_   |_ \ | |_| (_) || |_ / __| __) | | | |
  /  \  __/ | | | |__   _| ___) || |__\__, ||  _| (__ / __/| |_| |
 /_/\_\___|_| |_|    |_|(_)____(_)_|    /_(_)_|  \___|_____|\___/

(XEN) Xen version 4.3.1 (mockbuild@[unknown]) (gcc (GCC) 4.8.2 20131212 (Red Hat 4.8.2-7)) debug=n Thu Feb  6 16:52:58 UTC 2014
(XEN) Latest ChangeSet:
(XEN) Bootloader: GRUB 2.00
(XEN) Command line: placeholder

As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy using virt-manager to manage my VM’s. Let’s get started:

yum -y install virt-manager dejavu* xorg-x11-xauth
yum -y install libvirt-daemon-driver-network libvirt-daemon-driver-storage libvirt-daemon-xen
systemctl enable libvirtd.service
systemctl start libvirtd.service

By this point, you have the Xen hypervisor running and you have VM management tools available from virt-manager and libvirt. Enjoy!