Linux HVM or Physical to Paravirtual Conversion

From The FluidVM Wiki

You need to be logged on to the physical or HVM system that you want to convert to Paravirtual. Follow these steps and you'll hopefully end up with a template that will work. These steps are for CentOS/Redhat systems.

1. Create a file called /tmp/exclude and add the following lines to it:

.bash_history 
lost+found 
/dev/* 
/mnt/* 
/tmp/* 
/proc/* 
/sys/* 
/usr/src/* 

2. Tar the root file system

tar -czvf /tmp/centos-5.0-[ARCH].tar.gz –X /tmp/exclude /

[ARCH] can be either i386 or x86_64 depending on the system you are converting.

3. Copy the file system to the management server (not to the individual compute nodes!)

Copy the new tar file over to /xen-templates on the management server. The "scp" command is your friend.

4. Untar the file there in a temporary directory

mkdir temp
cd temp
tar xzf ../centos-5.0-[ARCH].tar.gz

5. Take care of a few configuration files - Be careful! Avoid the leading "/" or you'll make the management server conk.

etc/fstab - Remove all hard disk related entries and those that begin with "LABEL=". Add 2 entries: sda1 - root, ext3 and sda2, swap

/dev/sda1        /                etxt3    defaults  1 1
/dev/sda2        /                etxt3    defaults  0 0

You can let other entries like /dev/pts, /dev/shm, /proc, /sys in the fstab file be.

Physical NICs: etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX You'll need to decide on how many virtual Ethernet cards you'll eventually use. FluidVM allows for a maximum of 4 VNICs. You can create up to 4 files named ifcfg-eth0 through ifcfg-eth3. The content of each file must be as follows:

TYPE=Ethernet
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=yes

Don't forget to change the DEVICE= specifier in each of these file if you create more than one.

6. Compress the file back, overwriting the file previously copied from the compute node.

tar czf ../centos-5.0-[ARCH].tar.gz *

7. In the Management Server UI, go to Virtual Cockpit -> Templates and click on the "Sync Templates" button. Your new template must appear in the list. You can use this template now to create Xen Paravirtual guests.