Installing Xen Hypervisor on Ubuntu 14.04

Question

I would like to try out the Xen Hypervisor and have been following this guide: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Xen

I'm stuck at the part about the partition.

How do I go about setting up the partitions correctly during the install of Ubuntu to get it ready for Xen? I see that dom0 only needs to be 5-10gb. During installation do I click "Something Else" and how do I make sure I'm using LVM?

Solution

dom0 really needs less then 4GB. During partitioning I recommend:

• manual
• root partition 4GB
• no swap partition
• leave the rest of the disk unpartitioned

Install the OS and then install XEN.

Add to /etc/default/grubthe following line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN="dom0_mem=1024M,max:1024M dom0_max_vcpus=2"

Add a 512MB swap file in the local file system (e.g. /var/swap).

Partition the rest of the disk as you like. Ideally create another partition that fills up the disk, then use it as physical volume for LVM.