Xen: Installing guest VMs

[Rik van Riel]

On Sat, 26 Feb 2005, Robin Green wrote:

> An intriguing possibility is having a pre-install stage of Anaconda for 
> guest installs, which runs on the host as a normal program, e.g. for 
> things like hooking up LVM volumes to the new VM.

This sounds like a nice idea.

> You could even rewrite to run the ENTIRE install process on the host, 
> without even booting the guest kernel, although my suspicion is that 
> that route would involve an unnecessary amount of effort.

This doesn't ;)

I would imagine that eg. FC6 might have special features
that are not in FC4, meaning that the anaconda running on
the host would need to be enhanced to deal with the
configuration of future versions of the distribution.

Much easier to run the installer that matches the distro
that's being installed, so it knows how to configure things
right.

Using a pre-install program to call the installer might be
a nice touch, thoug.

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan