Oracle VM 3.1.1 using Kickstart to install Linux Guests

Question

Up till this point in my experience with Oracle VM.... I've always used templates to create VM guests. However, I have a need to greatly customize a OEL installation and I have traditionally done this via "kickstart scripts". From what I understand, "kickstart" is not supported for installing Linux guests via PXE. If it is... I certainly can't get it to work. I have read a few things here and there about the situation but I must admit I am a little confused.
Does anyone have any insight on how to install a Linux guest via a "kickstart" script called via PXE? If you can't use PXE, then how do you do it?
Thanks
Edited by: user12273962 on Jul 17, 2012 2:09 PM

Answer 1

Salut,
kickstart installations work for us. You don't say whether you're using HVM or PVM guests so I'll assume the latter.
Note that this works for tftp and http based installation - I've not tried nfs and I seem to recall that it doesn't work for PVM systems. At present we are using exactly the same infrastructure to install VMs as for our physical systems (tftp) to keep things simple but the original tests were with http exported images.
In the manager set the network boot path to be something like
kernel=vmlinuz ramdisk=initrd --args="ksdevice=eth0 network bootproto=dhcp ks=http://myksserver/ks.cgi" tftp://mypxeserver/boot/RHES_5_U7_X86_64_XEN
The kernel and ramdisk locations are relative to the URL given at the end so if you've exported the ISO then they will be a little different.
One way to check that the first stage works is to connect to a hypervisor and run
/usr/bin/xenpvboot <entire boot path as given above>
If this returns something bootable then you will see
linux (kernel /var/run/xend/boot/xenpvboot.vmlinuz.KYBNus)(ramdisk /var/run/xend/boot/xenpvboot.initrd.img.hKHQLg)(args 'ksdevice=00:16:3E:XX:XX:XX network bootproto=dhcp ks=http://myksserver/ks.cgi')
Ewan