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Nikolai Prokoschenko
Asked: 2009-08-06 01:58:31 +0800 CST

Easiest way to convert HVM DomU to PVM?

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I've got a bunch of Xen 3.4 DomUs that are currently running as HVM because of our infrastructure (Kickstart which doesn't handle Xen PVM yet). Both DomU and Dom0 are RHEL5 machines. If I understand the documentation and configuration correctly, it would suffice to install kernel-xen on the DomUs, replace hvm with pvm in the .xsp files and set the correct boot loader. But has anyone tried this, is this really this easy?

xen

3 Answers

  1. You'll probably want to be sure that you have the serial console configured correctly (note that it's hvc0 or xvc0 under paravirt instead of ttyS0).

    Depending on the kernel version you may also run into issues with your block devices being force-renamed from hda or sda to xvda. (This happens with paravirt_ops-style kernels; usually 2.6.27 and later, or so).

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  2. Yep, that's pretty much how you do it. Nothing particularly exciting about it, I've done it a few times (Debian machines rather than RHEL, but there's no differences that should matter).

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  3. Don't forget to add hvc0/xvc0 to the /etc/securetty list, if you hope to console in as root.

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