The Xen4CentOS6 project is a collaborative effort between the Xen Project, the Citrix Xen development teams, the CentOS Project team, GoDaddy Cloud operations group and RackSpace Hosting to package, deliver and maintain a stable Xen hypervisor and its related tooling for CentOS-6, enabling CentOS-6/x86_64 to be used as a dom0, base platform to host Xen in paravirt and fullvirt deployment roles.
We have tried to ensure that existing tooling that users have in production written again xm/xend will continue to work, while also adding support for the newer xenlight (xl) layers. Most libvirt functions also continue to work on Xen4CentOS6 as they did on Xen3 CentOS5, enabling users to easily migrate their infra over from CentOS-5 to 6.
A second primary principle we are working against is to build and deliver a Linux Kernel based on the 3.4 LTS release, stabilised via testing, with enhanced Xen support as recommended by the Xen development team.
For more information about the Xen4CentOS project, technical notes and release notes, please refer to the following URLS:
- Xen4CentOS6 Release Notes
- Xen4CentOS6 QuickStart Guide (the entire install and getting started process has been streamlined into a QuickStart guide)
We highly recommend reading through the Release Notes and the Quick Start guide before running your first install.
Keeping Up-to-date
We are working to integrate the Xen4CentOS release process, the update process and the announcements for security fixes into the regular CentOS systems respectively. Therefore it is highly recommended that users sign up to the CentOS-Announce list at lists.centos.org so you can keep up with security and bug fix errata notices.
Getting Help
The CentOS-Virt list at lists.centos.org is a great place to talk about most virtualisation centric topics relevant to CentOS. This complements the #centos-virt irc channel on irc.freenode.net. For community driven aid, also look at the wiki.centos.org/GettingHelp page on how you can put your problems and questions forward and request help for issues in the communities. Also check out xenproject.org (select the appropriate article in the Help menu).
Contribute
Contributions in all formats are welcome. Conversations about the Xen4Centos6 work happen on the centos-devel list ( at lists.centos.org), so feel free to drop in and say hi.
What’s next
We have some very interesting things coming up in the near future including the full xapi stack, openstack integration, opennebula integration. And pre-build CentOS-5 and CentOS-6 images.
Get started now : http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Xen/Xen4QuickStart
Karanbir Singh, CentOS Project.
