Chapter 8. Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 as a para-virtualized guest on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
This section describes how to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 as a para-virtualized guest on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Para-virtualization is only available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 hosts. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 uses the PV-opts features of the Linux kernel to appear as a compatible Xen para-virtualized guest.
This section covers creating a para-virtualized Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 guest on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 host using the
virt-install command. For instructions on
virt-manager, refer to the procedure in
Section 8.2, “Using virt-manager”.
This method installs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 from a remote server hosting the network installation tree. The installation instructions presented in this section are similar to installing from the minimal installation live CD-ROM.
Guests can be created with the command line virt-install tool. The --vnc option shows the graphical installation. The name of the guest in the example is rhel6PV, the disk image file is rhel6PV.img and a local mirror of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 installation tree is https://example.com/installation_tree/RHEL6-x86/. Replace those values with values for your system and network.
# virt-install --name rhel6PV \
--disk /var/lib/libvirt/images/rhel6PV.img,size=5 \
--vnc --paravirt --vcpus=2 --ram=1024 \
-location=https://example.com/installation_tree/RHEL6-x86/
Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be installed without a graphical interface or manual input. Use a Kickstart file to automate the installation process. This example extends the previous example with a Kickstart file, located at https://example.com/kickstart/ks.cfg, to fully automate the installation.
# virt-install --name rhel6PV \
--disk /var/lib/libvirt/images/rhel6PV.img,size=5 \
--nographics --paravirt --vcpus=2 --ram=1024 \
-location=https://example.com/installation_tree/RHEL6-x86/ \
-x "ks=https://example.com/kickstart/ks.cfg"
The graphical console opens showing the initial boot phase of the guest:
After your guest has completed its initial boot, the standard installation process for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 starts. For most systems the default answers are acceptable.
Refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Installation Guide for more information on installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
