Changing to a non-xen kernel in CentOS 5 (so you can run VMware Server)

VMware conflicts with the Xen hypervisor in the Linux kernel, making their use mutually exclusive. This is because they both use the hardware assisted virtualization features of the processor.

Why would you want to do this, when Xen can offer better performance than VMware? Portability – I can run a VMware virtual machine on Mac under VMware Fusion, on Windows under VMware Server, Workstation, or Player.

In my office, I’ve got a Dell Poweredge 830 with 8GB RAM, but my desktop computer is a Mac Mini which maxes out at 2GB RAM. It’s a no brainer to use the Dell for setting up the VM’s and then moving them to other machines when the time comes.

If your CentOS 5 box is running the xen kernel and try to install VMware Server 2.0 (currently in beta), you’ll get the following error when trying to install the RPM:

 You cannot install VMware Server on a system running a xen kernel

As a result, you need to switch to a non-xen kernel.

To do this, you first need to install the kernel. yum makes this easy:

yum install kernel

Then remove xen and the kernel-xen packages:

yum remove xen kernel-xen

Then you have to specify which kernel you want to run in /boot/grub/grub.conf. In that file there’s a list of kernels available to boot from:

#boot=/dev/sda
default=1
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title CentOS (2.6.18-92.1.10.el5)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet
        initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5.img
title CentOS (2.6.18-92.1.10.el5xen)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /boot/xen.gz-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5
        module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5xen ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet
        module /boot/initrd-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5xen.img

The line that says default= specifies which kernel to load, where 0 is the first one listed in the file. In my case, I had to change the line that says default=1 to default=0 to specify the non-xen kernel.

Reboot, and you’re good to go – the VMware RPM will install, and VMware server runs just fine.

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Published:
21.09.08 / 6pm
Categories:
Computing, How-To, Technology, Work
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