11 May 2010

Recently I downloaded RedHat 6 Enteprise beta (RHEL6). I wanted to install it as a Xen guest (DomU) on top of an existing Centos 5 Xen host. Unfortunately it did not work out of the box. I ran

virt-install --prompt

on the Xen host which let me install RHEL6 however when the install rebooted I was greeted with this error message

fs = fsimage.open(file, get_fs_offset(file))
IOError: [Errno 95] Operation not supported

Fortunately Karanbir Singh had a blog post about this at

http://www.karan.org/blog/index.php/2010/04/28/rhel6-xen-domu-on-a-centos-5-dom0

Differences I found were that I had to make the root partition an ext2 filesystem as well. Also I found out that I couldn’t review the partition layout if I ran the installation in the text mode. I had to use VNC to be able to set proper partition types.