Installation guide

Chapter 3. Installing XenServer

Any XenServer network, from the simplest to the most complex deployment, is made up of one or more

XenServer Hosts, each running some number of VMs, and one or more workstations running XenCenter

to administer the XenServer Hosts.

In order to create resource pools and enable XenMotion (live migration of VMs), a means of shared storage

also needs to be deployed on the network. This version of the XenServer product family supports Fibre

Channel, NetApp filers, LVM over iSCSI, and NFS shared storage.

This chapter describes installing XenServer Host software on physical servers, installing XenCenter on

Windows workstations, and connecting them to form the infrastructure for a network of Virtual Machines.

The first sections describe the installation of XenServer Host and XenCenter, which are common to all

deployments. The following sections describe several common installation and deployment scenarios and

provide information that is specific to each scenario.

Installers for both the XenServer Host and XenCenter are on the installation media. The installation media

also includes:

• a set of XenServer product documents in Adobe Acrobat PDF format

• a P2V tool for creating VM templates from an existing instances of supported Linux distributions running

on physical servers. See the XenServer Virtual Machine Installation Guide for details.

• a tool for restoring a backed-up XenServer Host control domain filesystem. See Section B.7.2, “Backing

up XenServer Hosts” for details.

3.1. Installing the XenServer Host

The XenServer Host consists of a Xen-enabled Linux operating system, a management agent, VM tem-

plates, and a local storage repository reserved for VMs. The XenServer Host must be installed on a dedi-

cated 64-bit x86 server. XenServer is not supported in a dual-boot configuration with any other operating

system.

You can install the XenServer Host from the installation CDs or set up a network-accessible TFTP server to

boot from via PXE. For details about setting up a TFTP server for PXE-booting the installer, see Appendix C,

PXE installation of XenServer Host.

Note

Do not install any other operating system in a dual-boot configuration with the XenServer Host; this

is an unsupported configuration.

The main installation CD contains the basic packages to set up the XenServer Host on a physical host, and

to create Windows VMs by using the Windows installation CDs. The XenServer package also contains a

separate CD containing support for creating Linux VMs (including complete built-in distributions of Debian

Sarge and Etch), and six CDs containing source code for the included open-source software.

If you want to install Linux VMs, be sure to

1. download the Linux Pack ISO