Xen 4.1.1 on Ubuntu

In the past before I started working at Canonical, I volunteered to maintain Xen on Ubuntu. This included supporting the hypervisor and the rather large kernel patch that needed to be ported to whatever version that Ubuntu is running on at the time. This process was not sustainable and KVM was eventually chosen as the hypervisor of choice for Ubuntu Server. Today the Xen dom0/domU kernel code is the upstream vanilla source so distros like Ubuntu can get from Xen.

At UDS-O in Budapest I hosted a session about bringing back Xen support for Ubuntu in Oneiric. It was a well attended and well received session and was kind of surprised about the attendance. At the time there was and still is having Ubuntu users run the Xen hypervisor, kernel, and user land tools on Ubuntu.

So how do you install In short this is how to do it:


sudo apt-get install linux-image-server
sudo apt-get install xen-utils-4.1 xen-utils-common
sudo apt-get install xen-hypervisor-4.1 (xen-hypervisor-4.1-amd64 if you are running amd64)
sudo apt-get install xenstore-utils


Its really easy to use libvirt and xen on Oneiric as well. There are a couple of bugs when trying to launch an HVM domain, but it will get fixed for the next LTS. Obligatory screen shot of running the Ubuntu Server installer on an HVM instance can be found below:

If you have any questions or have troubles running Xen on Oneiric. Please use launchpad to open bugs and so we can track the problems people are having with it.

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