Virtual Machine Virtual Machine This is a presentation on how to install and begin using Xen. Researched and Created by Bryan Bankhead

About Xen Xen is a virtual machine program that is very lightweight. Unlike most Virtual Machine programs that bring up the OS in a window, with Xen you actually boot to your Virtual Machine with Xen in the background. By doing this you can run multiple machines simultaneously without wasting as many resources. FYI Xen is only for Linux and it is a little bit more complicated that other alternatives.

Step One: Downloading The first step in this process is to download the Xen program for your Linux Operating System. This can be done by going to

Step Two: Installing Tarball- Once you have downloaded the tarball extract it to your desktop. Then open your terminal, and navigate to the extracted folder and run: sh./install.sh. Tarball- Once you have downloaded the tarball extract it to your desktop. Then open your terminal, and navigate to the extracted folder and run: sh./install.sh. RPM- To install a RPM download it, navigate to it with the terminal and type the command rpm -ivh xen-version.rpm.

Step Three: Editing the Bootloader Once you have installed Xen you will need to add Xen to your bootloader so that you can boot to the virtual machine. If you use Grub as your boot loader the config file is located in /etc/grub.conf. To get there go to the terminal and type cd /etc then type vi grub.conf Note: Grub entries will be different based on hardware and volume names.

Step Three cont: grub.conf entry This is an example of the grub entry. Note: some parts of this entry will vary. This is the part you want

Step Four: Reboot Once you have created the entry in grub.conf reboot and select Xen in the bootloader to test it. If it works it will boot up and bring you your native operating system. At first it may seem like nothing happened but if you type the command: uname -r it should come up with something like: xen.

The next step in the process is to setup a virtual machine. If you take the time there is a very nice program called virt-manager. It adds a GUI to Xen making it much easier to add and maintain virtual machines. This can be found at Step Five: Virt-Manager FYI: Fedora Core 6 comes pre-installed with Xen and Virt-manager.

Click connect Step Six: Using Virt-manager

Then you can create or edit your virtual machines through your Virt manager. Step Six: Using Virt-manager

You can also connect to the virtual machines to work on the individual virtual machines. Step Six: Using Virt-manager

The End For more information you can visit and for more information on virt-manager you can visit