General Info About Using Xen Images
All files on this site are provided without guarantee or warranty. Use at your own risk.
Each download is a bzipped tarball containing an image and cfg files:
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a xen guest filesystem
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sample xen configuration files to be used with xm create
The naming convention of the download tarball is:
<distribution>.<distro-version>.<created-date>.img.tar.bz2.
For example centos.5-3.x86.20090423.img.tar.bz2 contains
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centos.5-3.x86.img
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centos.5-3.x86.xen3.cfg
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centos.5-3.x86.xen3.pygrub.cfg
All of the packages installed in the image will be the latest versions available as of the created date, which is in yyyy-mm-dd format.
Prerequisites
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Working installation of Xen version 3
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The xen daemon (xend) must be running
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Enough filesystem space to accomodate the uncompressed tarball (generally 1GB)
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Enough unallocated RAM to run the xen guest (generally 128MB)
Default Configuration and Networking
Each filesystem is configured to use dhcp. The *.xen.cfg also is also configured for dhcp. It is recommended that you first test the filesystem using dhcp if possible before attempting other networking parameters. Each download page has additional notes on networking that is appropriate for a particular distribution.
The root login is root/password. It is highly recommened that you change the root password immediately.
Installation
You will need to uncompress the tarball to a local directory and edit the *.xen.cfg file to point to the uncompressed image and swap file.
If all is well you will see the guest’s boot messages scrolling by.