After I decided to research virtualization technology, my first task is to build a virtual cluster. Since I chould not get the root right from the HPC center, I had to make a try on my pc. First of all, I should install a virtual machine, and this is the start of my nightmare.

I google one paper named "Building a Virtual Cluster with Xen" which described the every detail, so I decided to implement it. I downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 CD img and Wubi.exe to install an Ubuntu in my pc, and I got the latest version of Xen, which is 3.4.1. I have to declare that, I have no internet where I do my work, so, many of you can imagine how bitter I suffered when I checked the prerequisites packages, finding that system lack of some. What's worse, some packages are not suitable because of its version. To solve it, I download the DVD img which can make me much more convenient to update those packages. However, some packages could not be satisfied in the end. And I found the installation needed internet access which made me very disappointing.

My senior told me to try KVM which is installed in Ubuntu. But, I found it was a false impression. I had to install Qemu. Soon, I found Qemu was not the key problem. The cpu of my pc does not support VT, that is, I could not run KVM. So I turned to VMware. The strange thing is I could not download the software because of the internet problem.

Suddenly, I found a paper named "Install Xen 3.3.1 in Federo 10" which told me how to install Xen offline. Since I have a Fedora 8 in Vmware, I immediately got down to working. I learned the last lesson in Ubuntu, I abondoned the idea to install a lower version of Xen. So I tried Xen 3.4.1. Ironically, this time, the verison of Fedora is too low to satisfy the Xen installation. I asked my another senior to download Fedora 11 DVD, and I hoped to release myself, because I felt so terrible during the course.

Unfortunately, the process of Xen installation on Fedora 11 is much shorter than 8, even if I tried Xen 3.3.0. I am nearly going crazy! Soon, I remembered when I installed Xen 3.0.1 in Fedora 8, the installation was succefully completed, yet I could not boot it, for some fd0 error. Desperately, I started installing Xen 3.3.1 in Fedora 8. "make"... "make install"... My heart flew up into my mouth when some errors appeared, however, the install process is still going, and I realized those are trivial ones.

Successful installation. After modifying the boot loader, I reboot the machine, waiting for the beautiful Xen interface. Yes, I have a Xen Liunx choice in boot, but I soon realized one similar error happened. This time, I believed I made some mistake in /boot/grub/menu.list. With the help of senior, I finally finished the correct modification.

Done! I could not help laughing! It has already taken me more than one week!

Running a xen in vmware is too slow, my next step is to install a Fedora 8 on my pc, and directly install Xen 3.3.0 in it. There's a long way to finish the virtual cluster, and also a long way to acquaint Linux and virtualization technology. However, after I made a successful installation of Xen, I believe I can do more!

Following is my steps of Xen 3.3.0 installation in Fedora 8, hoping to give you some help.

1.check packages

#cd xen3.3.0/tools/check
#./chk build

2.modify makefile

#vim xen3.3.0/Makefile
comment all lines of codes with 'stubdom'

3.modify hg

#vim xen3.3.0/buildconfigs/src.hg-clone
comment all lines of codes with 'hg'

4.generate linux-2.6.18-xen.hg

#cp linux-2.6.18-xen-3.3.0.tar ./xen3.3.0/
#tar -xzf linux-2.6.18-xen-3.3.0.tar
#mv linux-2.6.18-xen-3.3.0 linux-2.6.18-xen.hg

5.install

#make
#make install

6.install check. successful installation will give you following changes.

/etc/xen
/lib/modules
/boot