The New Xen

I still remember when, for the first time, we covered Xen in 2005. It was a

lengthy two-page article with lots of text-based commands and configuration file

modifications. At the end of it we could just virtualize different flavors of

Linux and could not support Windows-based OSs. But, today, things have changed.

Now, installing and running Windows Vista or 2003 is just a 5 or 6 click job. In

this article we will tell you how you can do that with Fedora 7 and a processor

with VT (Virtualization Technology) support.

As windows installation over Xen is only possible in Full Virtualization mode

where the guest machine bypasses the host machine and directly interacts with

the hardware, a standard Core 2 Duo or a quad Core is perfect for such kind of

virtualization. Now the next step will be to install Fedora 7. If you don't have

Fedora 7 then need not worry, as OpenSuSE and SuSE Linux Enterprise Edition SP1

are also capable of doing windows virtualization over Xen. But while installing

the OS make sure you select the Virtualization option and install the Xen

Kernel. Once installed you should boot the machine with the Xen Kernel.

Now let's go through a step-by-step guide and see how easy it is to install

Windows 2003 on top of Xen. You can also follow the same method to install

Windows Vista, XP or 2000. In this article we will see how to run Windows on Xen

for Fedora 7. Fedora 7 is also carried with this month's PCQXtreme DVD as a

bootable distro. So nothing is stopping you from doing a dry run of Xen with

Windows.

To begin, go to Applications menu>System Tools>Virtual Machine Manager. This opens up the window. Click on the File menu and select the 'New Machine' option	In the dialogue box fill the name of the virtual machine you are going to create; make sure there is no space between the words, else the system will give you errors

Select the type of virtualization you want to do. For virtualizing Windows you need to select the second option which says 'Full Virtualization'	Select the path from where Xen reads the installation media, type of OS and Variant. Here it is CD-ROM, Windows and Windows 2003/Vista respectively

Either select a physical hard disk device from the first option or specify a path for the file which will contain the virtual hard disk in the second option	From here you can either go with the default virtual network by selecting the first option or select a physical spare network adapter from the second option

Set the amount of Max and startup RAM the virtual machine will use. Also select the number of processors/cores the virtual machine will use	The installation of windows will begin. Once the installation is done you can get your Windows 2003 machine running dedicatedly on a core over your Xen