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6.2. Installing Xen packages on an existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux system
The section describes the steps necessary to install the virtualization packages on a working Red Hat Enterprise Linux system.
Registering your system with the subscription-manager command
Your machines must be registered on your Red Hat account to receive packages and updates. To register an unregistered installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, run the subscription-manager register
command and follow the prompts.
If you do not have a valid Red Hat subscription, visit the Red Hat online store.
Installing the Xen hypervisor with
yum
To use virtualization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux you need the xen
and kernel-xen
packages. The xen
package contains the hypervisor and basic virtualization tools. The kernel-xen
package contains a modified Linux kernel which runs as a virtual machine guest on the hypervisor.
To install the
xen
and kernel-xen
packages, run:
# yum install xen kernel-xen
Additional virtualization packages are available for management and configuration.
Recommended virtualization packages:
python-virtinst
- Provides the
virt-install
command for creating virtual machines. libvirt
libvirt
is an API library for interacting with hypervisors.libvirt
uses thexm
virtualization framework and thevirsh
command line tool to manage and control virtual machines.libvirt-python
- The libvirt-python package contains a module that permits applications written in the Python programming language to use the interface supplied by the
libvirt
API. virt-manager
virt-manager
, also known as Virtual Machine Manager, provides a graphical tool for administering virtual machines. It useslibvirt
library as the management API.
Install the other recommended virtualization packages:
# yum install virt-manager libvirt libvirt-python python-virtinst