About Xen

Xen is an open source virtual machine system. More information on Xen itself can be found at https://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/ and the Fedora Xen page.

Fedora is following the 3.0.x Xen line. Xen 3.0.0 was released in December of 2005 and is incompatible with guests using the previous Xen 2.0.x releases.

Quick Start

Setting up Xen and guests should be significantly more straight-forward with Fedora Core 5 than it previously was with Fedora Core 4. Here's a run-through of what is required to configure a system as a Xen host as well as setting up Xen guests.

System Requirements

• Your system must use GRUB, the default boot loader for Fedora¹

• Sufficient storage space for the guest operating systems. A minimal command-line Fedora system requires around 600MB of storage, a standard desktop Fedora system requires around 3GB.

• Generally speaking, you will want to have 256 megs of RAM per guest that you wish to install. This is largely due to memory requirements for the installation and will hopefully be less by the time FC5 is released.

• Support is present for both x86 and x86_64 systems

Conventions

Commands which require root privileges are prefixed with the character '#'. To become root, issue the command 'su' as a normal user and supply the root password. Alternatively, use another system such as 'sudo' if you have it setup.