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I'd like to experiment some with Xen. My problem is I do not know which OS to try to install it with. I use OpenBSD, but it can not run as Dom0 or DomU at this point.

I use Arch Linux on my website's VPS, so I know it and like it. The support for Xen just doesn't seem to be there though.

Can anyone suggest a nice (preferably lightweight, so not SUSE and such) Linux distro or *BSD to mess around with Xen in a non-production environment?

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You may want to define which version of Xen you want. RHEL/CentOS 5 ship a relatively old version of Xen that handles its virtualization differently in comparison to the bits being merged into the mainline kernel in the near future. – Ophidian Jan 26 '11 at 16:52
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7 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

Debian Squeeze has Xen 4, and I recommend it.

Here's a good installation guide to get you started.

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Does Debian ship a pv_ops dom0 kernel for testing with this? (I believe it's supposed to be merged into mainline 2.6.38 last I checked) – Ophidian Jan 26 '11 at 16:51
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It does, see wiki.debian.org/Xen#Notes for more info. – Kenny Rasschaert Jan 26 '11 at 17:08
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+1 For Debian Squeeze and Xen 4. – Niall Donegan Jan 26 '11 at 23:19
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up vote 1 down vote

Are you looking for guest OS or are you asking for a host OS to support XEN ? Xen doesn't need anything except itself. It's a bare metal virtualization solution.

If the question is "Which guest OS?" then Xen can support many of the Linux distros. The official support isn't there but they announced sometime ago on their forums unofficial support of other distros (before the sale to Citrix). I remember even that there was some mention of this in the manuals, too.

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I'm saying which Host OS. I know of a lot of Guest OSs (and all my hardware has virtual extensions, so I can run things unmodified also) – Earlz Apr 20 '10 at 18:58
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up vote 1 down vote

CentOS 5 can act as a dom0 if kernel-xen is installed and booted. And when you get tired of Xen, 5.4+ x86_64 supports KVM as well.

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up vote 1 down vote

Xen Engineers use RedHat

:()

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up vote 1 down vote

From posts on the Xen (FOSS) mailing list Debian regularly gets recommended as a good choice of host OS for Xen.

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up vote 1 down vote

We use Fedora 12 as both Dom0 and DomU in our cluster. We compile Xen and kernel by ourselves for Dom0 and Fedora 12 works quite well as DomU on LVM backend.

We are happy with it's stableness and performance.

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up vote 1 down vote

Many OpenBSD guys tend to like Gentoo Linux, its advantage being rolling updates. If you keep your gentoo regularly updated you'll have no trouble in following new Xen Hypervisor release. My production systems started out at Xen-3.0.x and are now fully up to date to Xen-4.1.2, without ever reinstalling or changing the dom0 operating system.

That's of course possible with each and every distro, but often you'd need to either install Xen by hand, roll your own Xen packages for your distro, or manually back port Xen packages from newer releases of your distro.

Worth of note is also Ubuntu that re-added Xen, so you can find xen-4.1.1 in the recently released Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot.

If jumping to newer Xen releases is not that critical or if you don't mind reinstalling dom0 from time to time, other good choices are the already cited distro of the 'red hat world': RHEL, Fedora, CentOS.

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