Debian/GNU Squeeze with Xen 4.0 - Part 1 - base system

This is the first post regarding Debian/GNU Linux running Xen 4.0 on a new piece of hardware.

This posting will cover base OS installation:
- Preparation/Partitioning
- Base Debian/GNU Linux installation on Dom0
- Xen packages installation
- Make Xen-Kernel default for Grub2

Upcoming posts will cover the following items:

- Installation of Debian/GNU Linux as DomU
- Installation of Windows Vista as DomU (using HVM)
- Installation of OpenSolaris 11 as DomU (using HVM)
- Installation of BDS systems as DomU



Hardware description:

Motherboard: Intel DQ57TM
CPU: Intel Core i7
RAM: 16 GB RAM
HDD: 2x500 GB SATA (internal)

Cost (Aug 2010): 1400 Euro

Partitioning:

I want RAID 1 (mirroring) on both disks.
I want RAID 1 for / file system and swap
I want LVM on RAID 1 for all Virtual Guest systems

Trouble:

The normal Debian/GNU Linux Lenny (stable) network installation CD does not recognize the network interface (e10000).
Base installation required Debian /GNU Linux Squeeze testing network installation cdrom.

During Partitioning:

- Create empty DOS partition label on both disks
- Add RAID Partition for /
- Add RAID Partition for swap
- Add RAID Partition for LVM

/dev/sd[a|b]1 - 15 GB - Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sd[a|b]2 - 1 GB - Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sd[a|b]3 - 471 GB - Linux raid autodetect

Within the Debian installer I choosed to not use any partitions on my empty LVM volume.
Logical Volumes will be created after Xen setup.

Finish base installation. Do not select any default installation method in taksel.

Installation of Xen Kernel


After first boot into new installed system I installed xen-linux-system-2.6.32-5-xen-amd64:

apt-get install xen-linux-system-2.6.32-5-xen-amd64

Now I rebooted into Xen Kernel. Since Debian/GNU Linux Version squeeze uses grub2 I reviewed the list of available Kernels and wrote down the number of the Xen Kernel.

Then I added "GRUB_DEFAULT=6" into /etc/default/grub and run update-grub afterwards.

Network Configuration

Since I want my Virtual Systems to be available from remote I decided to use Bridging on the network interface.

In /etc/network/interfaces I setup eth0 as bridge slave.
Then I added a new bridge interface with name xenbr0.

In /etc/xen/xend-config.spi I disabled the bridge-network section by giving /bin/true as parameter.