4.2. Installing Red Hat Virtualization on an existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux system

The section describes the steps necessary to install Red Hat Virtualization on a working copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Adding packages to your list of Red Hat Network entitlements

This section will describe the procedure for enabling Red Hat Network (RHN) entitlements to install the Red Hat Virtualization packages on your systems. You need to have these entitlements enabled and the packages installed to set up host systems.

Log in to RHN using your RHN username and password.

RHN registration

You machines must be registered with Red Hat Network and you require a valid Red Hat Network account in order to install Red Hat Virtualization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

To register an unregistered installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, run the rhn_register command and follow the prompts.

if you do not have a valid Red Hat subscription, visit the Red Hat online store.
Select the systems you want to install Red Hat Virtualization on.
In the System Properties section the present systems entitlements are listed next to the Entitlements header. Use the (Edit These Properties) link to change your entitlements.
Select the Virtualization checkbox.

Your system is now entitled to receive the Red Hat Virtualization packages. The next section covers installing these packages.

Installing Red Hat Virtualization with `yum`

To commence using virtualization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux you will need the xen and kernel-xen packages. The xen package contains the Xen hypervisor and Xen tools. The kernel-xen package contains a modified linux kernel which runs as a virtual machine guest on the Xen hypervisor.

To install the xen and kernel-xen packages, run:

# yum install xen kernel-xen

Fully virtualized guests on the Itanium® architecture require the guest firmware image package(xen-ia64-guest-firmware) from the supplementary installation DVD. This package can also be can be installed from RHN with the yum command:

# yum install xen-ia64-guest-firmware

Other recommended virtualization packages:

python-virtinst: Provides the virt-install command for creating virtual machines.
libvirt-python: The libvirt-python package contains a module that permits applications written in the Python programming language to use the interface supplied by the libvirt library to use the Xen virtualization framework.
libvirt: libvirt is an API library which uses the Xen virtualization framework, and the virsh command line tool to manage and control virtual machines.
virt-manager: Virtual Machine Manager provides a graphical tool for administering virtual machines. It uses libvirt library as the management API.

To install the other recommended virtualization packages, use the command below:

# yum install virt-manager libvirt libvirt-python libvirt-python python-virtinst