1.4 ISO Provisioning for PVM Guest Installations

When you create a PVM guest from an ISO file, you cannot use an ISO file from a repository to install the operating system. Oracle VM requires that the ISO file is mounted so that its internal file system contents are available during the installation of the operating system for a PVM guest. The mounted ISO file can be made available via an NFS, HTTP or FTP server. The following examples show how to create and use mounted ISO files on an NFS share, and on an HTTP server.

Example 1.12 Creating an installation tree on an NFS share

This example creates an installation tree for paravirtualized guest by mounting an ISO file. The installation tree is made available via an NFS share. On the NFS server, enter

# mkdir -p /isos/EL5u6-x86_64
# mount -o ro,loop /path/Enterprise-R5-U6-Server-x86_64-dvd.iso /isos/EL5u6-x86_64
# exportfs *:/isos/EL5u6-x86_64/

When you create the virtual machine using the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface, enter the installation location in the Network Boot Path field in the Create Virtual Machine wizard as:

nfs:example.com:/isos/EL5u6-x86_64

Example 1.13 Creating an installation tree on an HTTP server

This example creates an installation tree from an ISO file that can be accessed via HTTP. On the HTTP server, enter

# cd /var/www/html
# mkdir EL5u6-x86_64
# mount -o ro,loop /path/Enterprise-R5-U6-Server-x86_64-dvd.iso EL5u6-x86_64

When you create the virtual machine using the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface, enter the installation location in the Network Boot Path field in the Create Virtual Machine wizard as:

http://example.com/EL5u6-x86_64

Tip

If you have multiple ISO files, you can mount each ISO file and copy the contents into a single directory. All the ISO files are then available from the same location.