[Xen-users] Easiest OS to use for xen 4.0?

["Beasley, Julien" <Julien.Beasley@xxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone,

I realize this question may be frequently asked. I’d like to assure you that I 
did as much research as I could myself before resorting to mailing this list ☺. 

I need to run Xen with a DomU guest OS being windows 7. My understanding is 
that I need Xen 4.0 in order to do this. I have a system to build exclusively 
for this purpose. My question for everyone is, what is the *easiest* choice of 
host OS for running Xen4.0. Here is what I have tried/researched.

Open Suse 11.4:  I’ve spent a couple of days trying this. I had to upgrade to 
Xen4.0, and that worked reasonably well. I had difficultly starting guest OSes 
due to a bug (resolved at 
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/applications/463698-vm-install-error-none-opensuse-11-4-x86_64-a.html)
After fixing that, I was able to install Win7 as a guest OS. I've been having a 
a difficult time with the networking setup. Looking at the xend-config.sxp file 
it seems that the network-bridge script doesn't work, and that bridges should 
be configured manually in YaST. I've been having a hard time with this, which 
is what prompted me to find an OS where things might work "out of the box" 
more. I've also found some threads with people having problems even after 
manual configuration of the network 
(http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/network-internet/455511-x64-xen-bridge-configured-but-no-br0-no-internet-connection.html).
 I will admit I don't fully know what I'm doing on the networking side here, so 
this is why I was hoping for a dom0 OS that would be easier to work with 
defaults.

Fedora: This seems to work but nowhere near as seamless as OpenSuSE.  Looks 
like you need to edit grub, etc.. 
(http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/Fedora13Xen4Tutorial?highlight=%284.0%29%7C%28Ubuntu%29%7C%28xen%29)

Ubuntu: Similar to Fedora 
(http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/03/26/steps-to-try-xen-4-0-0-release-candidate-8-on-ubuntu-lucid-10-04-64-bits/)

Xen cloud platform: I apologize if this is a really stupid question, but is 
this an OS? It seems that this would be perfect, except that it only supports 
Xen hypervisor 3.4.2. Is this something that can be easily upgraded? The XCP 
1.1 beta page doesn't mention anything about hypervisor 4.0

This is the research I've done so far. I would greatly appreciate it if someone 
could point me to the OS that would be best suited to run windows7 as a guest 
OS. I'm not looking for anything fancy, just whatever OS would be the *easiest* 
to get a guest OS as win7 to work with networking.

Thank you for your time, and thank you very much for any assistance!

Julien

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