Project Kronos

This is Project Kronos, which aims to provide the ability to install the XCP toolstack onto a pre-existing OS deployment.

An overview

What is the point of Project Kronos? Well, there are times that you may be happy to take an ISO image, put it on a clean machine and use the CentOS-based XCP distribution. Others may wish to use an existing installation and set that up for use with the Xen and the XCP toolstack, or to install a non-CentOS-based distribution as their starting point. In either case, you should probably start by reading the http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/XCP_Introduction, which will give you an overview of what tools, documentation, etc., are available.

Project Kronos aims to cater for those who are not covered by the first use case: in other words, they wish to install the XCP toolstack for themselves, either on an existing installation, or on a non-CentOS-based one. Kronos is currently aimed at Debian-based distributions, but may grow to include others in the future.

Warnings - README

You need to read these warnings. If you don't, you could do serious damage to your system, leave it unbootable, be surprised when things don't work as you expect (or at all), and generally fail to create World Peace[tm]. And that would be a pity.

An important note: don't be tempted to install any kernel (via apt, for instance) which ends in "-virtual" during this process. Such kernels are intended to run as Guests (that is, "VMs"), and are not configured to be used as the Dom0 kernel. You will run into particular problems if you try this on a system which uses an Nvidia card, as the nvidia-current drivers do not currently seem to compile against these kernels, and you will therefore not be able to start X correctly. Given the standard Oneiric start up and splash screens, this isn't a particularly easy problem to fix, so avoid it in the first place!

Another important note: the instructions on this page assume that:

• you know what you are doing with Linux, and are able to repair any issues that might arise as a result of following (or mis-following...) the instructions;
• you are running as root. If you don't know what this entails, then see 1. above, and seek further help from the community before proceeding.

A couple of network-related notes

1. XAPI expects to run in a clean environment, and listens on ports 80 and 443. If you're running anything else on these ports (typically Apache/Apache2), then you're likely to have problems.
2. There is a known bug (which needs to be fixed) which means that in certain circumstances when you are using VPN software (e.g. when you have a tun0 interface listed in ifconfig), xapi will fail. Please ensure that you remove all such software before attempting to run xcp-xapi.

Installing on a Debian-based distribution

Kronos has so far provided the capability to install the XCP toolstack Debian-based (.deb) distributions. Instructions currently exist for the following:

• Debian Squeeze
• Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot (11.10)

If you have managed to install the XCP toolstack on any other distributions or versions, please let us know or edit/add the relevant pages.

XCP toolstack on a Debian-based distribution provides detailed instructions for:

• Debian SID / Wheezy
• Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot (11.10)

Using XCP - preparing the toolstack

Using XCP - preparing the toolstack

Installing a Guest

Now that you have the XCP toolstack set up, you probably want to install some guests. We provide examples of how to set up a Windows guest or a Linux guest. You can, of course, mix and match.

• Installing Linux on Kronos
• Installing Windows on Kronos

Setting up networking

• Networking with the XCP toolstack.

Setting up LVM backed XFS SR

• Creating a LVM backed XFS SR.

Using the XCP toolstack

The command line interface provided by the XCP toolstack is large, expressive, and somewhat daunting. Luckily, there is a page devoted specifically to it: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/XCP_Command_Line_Interface.

Compiling from source

For some people, half (or more) of the fun is getting it all working for yourself. We provide a guide to allow you to Compile the XCP toolstack from source.