Besides nstalling paravirtualized guest systems, Xen can also host fully-virtualized guests on machines with appropriate hardware. This means that you can run unaltered operating systems like CentOS 3 or Microsoft Windows.

This howto describes how you can install a fully-virtualized guest, without using virt-manager, or its console variant virt-install. Often, users require more customizations than these tools provide, so it is usually better to use the tools that lie underneath. This howto uses the virsh tool from the libvirt package, which is a generic tool for management of virtual machines.

Xen is one of the coolest pieces of software I have ever used. It allows me to partition my box into manageable pieces, for increased security and increased resource utilization. I have been playing extensively with Xen for more than a year and have also written some posts about it.

NetBSD is a lean, mean, fast free, open source operating system and is nicely supported under Xen, has nice features like the PF packet filter and the pkgsrc ports-like collection and runs in nearly every single hardware architecture on earth. Because of this, I decided to run NetBSD 3.1 on Xen. NetBSD can run either as the privileged domain (called dom0) or as an unprivileged guest (called domU) domain. Since I was already running Linux under Xen as a domU, I am mostly interested in running NetBSD 3.1 as a domU guest on Xen. dom0 can be either Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 or Fedora Core 6, but feel free to use any other Linux distribution as most of them are Xen-ready.