Xen is a popular open-source hypervisor that allows running multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine. In this tutorial, we will guide you through the process of installing Xen on Fedora CoreOS, the latest release of the Fedora operating system, which is designed for use in containerized environments.
Before you begin, you must have the following:
To install Xen on Fedora CoreOS, you need to install the necessary packages using the dnf package manager. First, update the package repository index:
sudo dnf update
Then, install the Xen packages:
sudo dnf install xen libvirt-daemon-kvm virt-manager
The xen package provides the core Xen hypervisor, while the libvirt-daemon-kvm and virt-manager packages provide the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) backend and a GUI tool for managing virtual machines, respectively.
By default, the Xen hypervisor is not configured to start automatically when the system boots up. To enable the Xen hypervisor at boot time, create a new systemd unit file:
sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/xen-hypervisor.service
Paste the following content into the file:
[Unit]
Description=Xen Hypervisor
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/lib/xen/bin/xen-hypervisor-4.14-amd64 \
dom0_mem=max,min:4096M,nosave
Restart=always
User=root
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
This unit file will start the Xen hypervisor on boot with a maximum of 4 GB of memory allocated to the control domain (dom0). You can adjust the memory limit to suit your needs.
Save the file by pressing Ctrl+X, then Y, then Enter.
Next, enable the service to start on boot:
sudo systemctl enable xen-hypervisor
Finally, start the service:
sudo systemctl start xen-hypervisor
To verify that Xen is running correctly, use the xl command to list the virtual machines:
sudo xl list
If everything is working properly, the output should show only the control domain:
Name ID Mem VCPUs State Time(s)
Domain-0 0 4000 4 r----- 2922.1
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Xen on Fedora CoreOS.
Xen is a powerful hypervisor that can run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine. In this tutorial, we showed you how to install Xen on a machine running Fedora CoreOS. We also demonstrated how to configure the Xen hypervisor to start automatically at boot time, and how to verify that Xen is running correctly.
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