[Fedora-xen] virt-install

[Frederick N. Brier]

I have continued to experiment creating VMs and blowing them away using 
a variety of storage and other options.  I want to be able to create a 
Fedora 8 Guest VM, install a number of packages, configure them, and 
then save it as a template.  Then copy the template and install it.  The 
file storage options seemed the best, but it apparently has flaws for 
speed and integrity.  I created one using LVM in the guest, but read 
that was unnecessary overhead and made it difficult to mount the 
images.  So I tried to create one by deleting the volumes and that 
seemed to work, but it still created a partition with the file system 
inside and I could not mount it.  The blktap driver was recommended if 
you were not going to use an LVM in the guest or Dom0, but I do not know 
how to invoke virt-install to create a simple blktap driver based ext3 
file system in a file.  What are virt-install parameters do you use to 
specify using the blktap driver to a file?  And if there are any 
misconceptions in my message, please feel free to trounce on them.  If 
there is a wiki or man page, please just give me the URL.  Thank you.

Fred

John Maclean wrote:
> /usr/sbin/virt-install --name fx6foo \
> --paravirt \
> --ram 256 \
> --nographics \
> --file-size 10 \
> --file /dev/zulu_images/fx6foo \
> --location
> http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/i386/os/
>
>
> ^^ That kind of thing. The man page has a few examples right at the end.
>
> On Sun, 13 Jan 2008 17:27:34 +0000 "Daniel P. Berrange"
> <berrange at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 02:44:12AM -0500, Frederick N. Brier wrote:
>>     
>>> I just installed Fedora 8 and the Fedora Xen packages.  I have been 
>>> trying to get a variety of VMs installed, but the most basic one is
>>> just a Fedora guest VM.  Please correct me if I am wrong, but the
>>> correct tool is "virt-install".  It asks a number of questions, but
>>> the last is "What is the install location?"  I finally found an
>>> excerpt from a book that had 
>>> "http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386" as
>>> the answer.  But that is not correct it is actually:
>>> "http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/*6*/i386/os", 
>>> but that is for core 6, not 7 or Fedora 8.  And the file tree does
>>> not have a 
>>> "http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/*8*/i386/os".  
>>> Is there no place where fc8's files are posted?  Or are we supposed
>>> to specify 6?  I would have said okay, except I started getting
>>> messages like this:
>>>       
>> Fedora Core & Extras mered during the F7 release, so the download URLs
>> changed style slightly
>>
>> eg, i386 F8
>>
>> http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Fedora/i386/os/
>>
>> eg, x86_64 F7
>>
>> http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/x86_64/os/
>>
>> Basically, you always want the URL ending in '/os/' for your release.
>>
>> You can also use  nfs:// or ftp:// URLs.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Dan.
>>     
>
>
>