Chapter 7. Installation Recipes

Installation of XenServer can be accomplished in minutes using a variety of methods. Selecting the correct method will depend in part on the scale of your intended deployment and your hardware configuration. In addition to covering installation of XenServer, this chapter also covers driver management and the installation of extra components via supplemental packages.

Manual Installation

Problem

Installation of XenServer is desired to either perform a proof-of-concept or creation of a small XenServer pool.

Solution

Download the installation media from http://xenserver.org/download, and either burn it to a CD/DVD or create a bootable USB Flash device.

Discussion

In a manual installation, the XenServer installation ISO is either burned to a bootable CD or copied to a bootable Flash device. The target XenServer host then boots from the installation media and can be installed. Manual installation is typically used when the number of hosts to be deployed is small, and either physical access to the host exists or access to a remote host console such as HP iLO or the Dell Remote Access Console. During a manual installation, the user will be prompted for a variety of information, but the most important configuration items relate to networking. Please refer to the section “Define Network Topologies” in Chapter 5 for more information.