Fedora virtualization via Xen

Xen is a powerful new virtualization system that enables you to run multiple operating systems on one computer. Here’s how you can install it on your Fedora machine, and how to get it configured to best suit your environment.

This article is excerpted from the book Fedora 7 Unleashed by Andrew Hudson and Paul Hudson, SAMS
Publishing, August 2007.

Virtualization versus paravirtualization

When you create a new VM, it is allocated a chunk of RAM all to itself, and lives completely self-contained from the outside world. VMware even has a virtual BIOS to complete the illusion. If your VM wants to communicate to other VMs on the same computer, it has to do so over a TCP/IP network connection, just like any other machine. In fact, when you install an operating system on a virtual machine, it cannot even tell that it is a virtual machine because it looks identical to raw hardware.

The problem with this type of virtualization is that it is very slow. For example, the VM has to access hardware frequently (to save files, show a display, and so on), but of course it cannot access the hardware directly because doing so would interfere with other VMs. Instead, its requests have to be translated and rerouted to the host operating system, where they are handled. Similarly, if the VM tries to execute any special CPU instructions that would reveal that the VM is actually a virtual machine, the host OS has to stop those instructions and fake the answer so that the VM is not any wiser (a technique known as binary patching).

The solution is to move from virtualization to paravirtualization — the technique that Xen uses. Linux is open source, so the Xen developers modified the Linux source code so that Linux becomes aware of its existence as a virtual machine. When the virtual Linux needs access to the hardware, it just asks Xen for permission. The difference is huge: You can expect a normal VM to run at about 50% of the speed of a native machine, whereas a Xen virtual machine can run up to about 95%, simply by removing the need for binary patching and other virtual hacks.

The downside to Xen is that the source code has to be patched, which rules out closed-source operating systems. VMware runs Windows XP on Linux out of the box, but Xen cannot. That said, the new chips from Intel and AMD include virtualization on hardware, which enables Xen to run unmodified Windows at full speed on top of Linux. Without this technology, Xen can use only a modified, open source distribution, such as Linux, NetBSD, or FreeBSD.

How Xen works

Xen is actually a very small operating system that has the sole goal of managing the resources of virtual machines. On top of the Xen OS runs what would previously have been called the host OS — the main operating system for the machine. Unlike VMware, the host OS (known as domain 0 or just dom0 in Xen terminology) is a virtual machine, but has special privileges assigned to it so that it is more responsive.

The domain 0 VM is where you control Xen, and where you start other guest VMs — known as unprivileged domains or domU. You can start as many as you want, with the only real limit being the amount of RAM in your machine. Because the domU OS is fully aware of its status as a Xen virtual machine, Xen lets you change the amount of RAM in a VM while it’s running, with the exception that you can’t go above the initial allocation of RAM.

Fedora Linux specifies a minimum system requirement of 256MB RAM, which means that if you are to run Fedora on top of Fedora, you need at least 512MB RAM. Keeping in mind that Xen uses a very small amount of RAM for itself, you should ideally have at least 768MB of RAM to be able to run two operating systems side by side at full speed.

Note that if you have tried Xen on old versions of Fedora, you no longer need to disable SELinux to get Xen to work.

Installing Xen

The first step is to convert your current OS to a virtualized guest OS. This is actually a very easy thing to do because, as discussed, domain 0 has special privileges — such as the capability to access hardware directly. As a result, you do not have to reformat your machine: dom0 reads straight from the disk, uses the graphics card, uses the sound card, and so on.

To get started, go to Applications -> Add/Remove Software. From the window that appears, choose List view, and then select the following packages: kernel-xen, vnc, and xen. The kernel-xen package provides a Linux kernel that is configured to run on top of Xen without any special privileges, as well as a Linux kernel designed to be used as dom0 so it can access hardware directly. The vnc package is there to make VM management much easier. Finally, the xen package gives you all the tools you need to create and manage virtual machines. Along with these packages, there are several other dependencies that Fedora will automatically resolve for you, so just go ahead and install all the packages.

Because you have installed two new kernels, Fedora updates your GRUB boot configuration to make them bootable, but leaves your original, non-Xen kernel as the default. Switch to root and bring up /boot/grub/grub.conf in your favorite text editor. Look for the line "default=2" and change it to read "default=0". This might vary on your machine — set it to the position of the Xen hypervisor kernel in the grub.conf file, remembering that Grub counts from 0 rather than 1. That is, the first OS in the list is considered to be number 0. Note that you should not set the guest kernel as the default because it will not boot — it is designed only to be created on top of the hypervisor (dom0).

Save your changes and reboot, making sure that your new hypervisor kernel is the one that boots. Your system should restart as normal, and you will probably not notice anything different beyond a smattering of “XEN” at the very beginning of the boot phase. But when you are back in control, open a terminal and run uname -r. It should tell you that you are running the Xen hypervisor kernel.

At this point, you are already running as a virtual machine on top of the Xen kernel, but there is no way for you to communicate with the Xen kernel and thus manipulate the virtual machines on the system. To do that you need to start the Xen daemon, which provides the link between dom0 (where you are working) and the Xen kernel underneath.

Run ps aux | grep xend. If you do not see xend in the resulting listing, you need to start it yourself by switching to root with su - and then running service xend start. Now run the command xm list, which prints out a list of all the virtual machines that are running and how much RAM they have allocated — you should see Domain-0, which is your current system, in the list.

Setting up guest operating systems

The output from xm list probably shows that domain 0 is taking up all the RAM on your system, which means there is no room to create a new guest OS. Fortunately, you can resize that memory usage downward to make space: Run the command xm mem-set Domain-0 256 to have domain 0 use 256MB RAM. This is the bare minimum for a Fedora install, so expect some slowdown — if you have more than 512MB RAM, we recommend you allocate more to each VM.

Creating a domU VM on Fedora is handled with the xenguest-install.py script, which you should run as root. You are asked to do the following things:

1. Give your virtual machine a friendly name (for example, FCUnleashed) so that you can differentiate between it and other virtual machines.

2. Allocate it some RAM, with the minimum being 256MB; more is better.

3. Choose where it should save its files. Xen uses a loopback filesystem so that all of a VM’s files are stored in just one file on domain 0. Enter something like /home/paul/vms/fcu.img.

4. Select how big the virtual disk should be. For a basic install, around 4GB should be enough.

5. Set the install location (the place from which Fedora should install). This needs to be an online resource, so enter http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386.

Now sit back and wait. Downloading the necessary files can take quite a while, depending on your connection speed.

Once your files have been downloaded, the normal Fedora installer (Anaconda) will start, and will ask whether you want to install using text mode or VNC — choose Start VNC so that you have a graphical install. Xen’s guests do not have direct access to the hardware, which means they have nowhere to display graphics. VNC lets you have your Xen VM render its graphics to your dom0 display inside a window, which means you can work with multiple VMs simultaneously. When you select Start VNC, you are prompted to enter a password. Click OK and you see the VNC address to which you need to connect. This address should look something like 10.0.0.1:1, where the :1 is the number of the VNC display.

Back on dom0, you should have installed VNC Viewer at the start of this chapter, so go to Applications -> Accessories -> VNC Viewer. Now enter that address (including the :1 or whatever it is for you) and click Connect. Enter your password when prompted. VNC starts and you see the Fedora installer. Depending on the resolution of your screen, the Fedora installer might not fit entirely on the screen; in that case, you have to use the scrollbars to get around.

The installer is as normal from here on in, except of course that it is using the virtual disk you created earlier so you have only a small amount of space. It might refer to your hard disk as something like /dev/xvda — do not worry about that.

Runtime configuration

Now that your guest OS is up and running, you can start trying out more of the features of the xm command on dom0. You have already seen xm mem-set, which alters the amount of memory allocated to a machine. This works because the domU VM is aware of its virtualized state and can therefore handle having memory taken away. This extends further: You can use xm shutdown yourvm to have Xen politely request the VM to shutdown. On Linux, this goes through the whole shutdown sequence properly, ensuring that the machine is cleanly terminated. If you want an immediate shutdown, use xm destroy yourvm, but make sure the virtual machine is in a safe state first — if you have a text file open and unsaved, for example, it will be lost.

The xm command can also be used to save snapshots of a virtual machine, rather than just switching them off. To do this, use xm save yourvm yourvm.state. That command essentially saves the RAM of the yourvm VM (change yourvm to whatever you called your virtual machine) to a file and then turns off the VM. To restore a saved state, just use xm restore yourvm.state. If you want to create a virtual machine from a configuration file, use xm create -c yourconfig. Note that Xen searches the directory /etc/xen for configuration files, and that each VM must have a unique name assigned to it and set in the configuration file.

You can connect to the console of any virtual machine by running xm console yourvm. To exit from a console, press Ctrl-] (Control + right bracket). This does not shut down the VM; the VM continues to run, but you are no longer connected to it and have to use xm connect to reconnect.

TIP: The configuration files in /etc/xen are in text format and so are easily edited. For example, if you want to change the number of CPUs a VM sees, look for the vcpus setting. Note that these are virtual CPUs rather than real ones — you can set this to 8 and have your guest see eight CPUs, even if your actual machine has just one. This is a great way to test a cluster without going beyond your desktop!

Related Fedora and Xen commands

The following commands are useful for working with Xen on Fedora:

• virt-manager — Red Hat’s new graphical Xen management system

• vncviewer — Lets you connect to the graphical output of a Xen VM

• xend — Starts and stops the Xen daemon without using the service command

• xenguest-install.py — A helpful script that generates configuration files for you

• xm — Lets you manipulate the state of virtual machines while they are running

Copyright © 2007 Pearson Education. All rights reserved.