4.2. Installing Red Hat Virtualization on an existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux system
The section describes the steps necessary to install Red Hat Virtualization on a working copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
This section describes how to enable Red Hat Network(RHN) entitlements for the Red Hat Virtualization packages. You need these entitlements enabled to install and update the virtualization packages on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You require a valid Red Hat Network account in order to install Red Hat Virtualization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
In addition, your machines must be registered with RHN. To register an unregistered installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, run the rhn_register command and follow the prompts.
Procedure 4.1. Adding the Virtualization entitlement with RHN
-
Log in to
RHN using your RHN username and password.
-
Select the systems you want to install Red Hat Virtualization on.
-
In the
System Properties
section the present systems entitlements are listed next to the
Entitlements
header. Use the link to change your entitlements.
-
Select the checkbox.
Your system is now entitled to receive the Red Hat Virtualization packages. The next section covers installing these packages.
To use virtualization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux you need the xen and kernel-xen packages. The xen package contains the hypervisor and basic virtualization tools. The kernel-xen package contains a modified linux kernel which runs as a virtual machine guest on the hypervisor.
To install the
xen and
kernel-xen packages, run:
# yum install xen kernel-xen
Fully virtualized guests on the Itanium® architecture require the guest firmware image package(xen-ia64-guest-firmware) from the supplementary installation DVD. This package can also be can be installed from RHN with the yum command:
# yum install xen-ia64-guest-firmware
Recommended virtualization packages:
-
python-virtinst
-
Provides the virt-install command for creating virtual machines.
-
libvirt
-
libvirt is an API library for interacting with hypervisors. libvirt uses the xm virtualization framework and the virsh command line tool to manage and control virtual machines.
-
libvirt-python
-
The libvirt-python package contains a module that permits applications written in the Python programming language to use the interface supplied by the libvirt API.
-
virt-manager
-
virt-manager, also known as
Virtual Machine Manager
, provides a graphical tool for administering virtual machines. It uses libvirt library as the management API.
Install the other recommended virtualization packages:
# yum install virt-manager libvirt libvirt-python libvirt-python python-virtinst
