This repo allows one to create a custom CentOS 7 iso which delivers Xen 4.4 stack installed over CentOS 7 minmal install. This also delivers 2 demo VMs (CentOS-6 and CentOS-7) along with its configuration files. For networking in Demo VMs it configures a network-bridge named xenbr0 with default network-interface during installation as its slave.
It requires minimum 15 GB space on hard disk to install both demo VMs. if there is not sufficient space for both VMs it will check whether it has sufficient space for single VM and it yes then it will install single c7-demo otherwise it will proceed without demo VMs. Both demo VMs are lvm backed. Size of demo VMs is 4GiB. After installation you can find the base images ( qcow2 ) of demo VMs in /srv/xen directory. which you can use to create more VMs. On firstboot for each VMs user will given root password, and will be advised to change it immediately after login.
The installation itself doesn't require internet connection, but it requires internet connection for bridge networking setup. It will use the default interface used during installation for bridge-networking. I am using nmcli for bridge-networking setup, it doesn't support wifi interfaces as bridage-slave, ethernet interfaces works just fine.
After installation you can see 2 xl config scripts CentOS-6-demoVm.cfg and CentOS-7-demoVm.cfg in /root directory. The kickstart scripts used to install these VMs can be found at https://github.com/gautamMalu/ks4CentOSXen
The qcow2 VM images of both VMs is stored in /srv/xen/ folder. These images can be used as template imgages to install more VMs.
To run CentOS-6 demo VM:
xl create -c CentOS-6-demoVm.cfg
To run CentOS-7 demo VM:
xl create -c CentOS-7-demoVm.cfg
In order to use this repo, you need to have the following:
- A running CentOS instance (physical or virtual) with spare disk space
- I have used it with CentOS 6.6 final and Centos 7 ,but it should work well with othere versions of CentOs also
Included is a setup_env.sh script to be run inside the CentOS instance. This
script will install the necessary packages required to create the custom ISO.
The next script is build_Xen_iso.sh which takes a series of commands:
- fetch
- layout
- finish
This command will fetch a CentOS 7 minimal ISO from a given mirror (see $MIRROR in build_xen_iso.sh), I am using the one which is fastest for me. If an iso is already there then it will recheck its checksum with latest iso. If they do not match it will download the lastest iso.
This command will extract the ISO and place it onto disk, and add required rpms to Packages.
This command will first fetch the custom anaconda from https://github.com/gautamMalu/XenInBox and make an updates.img file. After that it will copy that image, update the repodata and make the custom iso with name c7-xen.iso
c7-xen.iso will be in isos directory
You can run each command separately or all together.
sudo ./build_Xen_iso.sh fetch
sudo ./build_Xen_iso.sh layout
sudo ./build_Xen_iso.sh finish
Or
sudo ./build_Xen_iso.sh fetch layout finish
The resulting ISO will be ready to boot and install a clean image ready for with Xen working. Check it with by running xl info command.