Overview

Avance R3.1 has added supports 32- and 64-bit versions of RHEL and CentOS 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 VMs.  These OS distributions can be installed from their .ISO media (via virtual CD), as provided by Red Hat or CentOS.    These new Linux types are installed from a Virtual CD and have their own Type that must be selected in the VM create Wizard.  Starting with RHEL and CentOS 6.1, the vendors now include Xen-aware disk and network device drivers (xen_blkfront and xen_netfront).  This allows Avance to support these Linux installations directly from the vendors’ media.  Installing a VM from virtual CD is simple and familiar to administrators who normally install Linux on bare-metal machines.  Graphical or text-mode installations can be completed interactively using the VNC console  which is automatically started when a new VM is created.

Post-installation

RHEL/CentOS R6.x VMs may suffer severe network blackouts under fault conditions if their network stacks are not configured properly.   A script is provided which modifies a default network setting to solve this issue.  It can be downloaded from the Avance Web Site and executed directly from the VM console as root.   Alternatively you can execute the following command from your VM directly:

curl  http://download.avancehelp.com/linux-patches/blackout.sh | bash

Hardware Restrictions:

The RHEL/CentOS R6.x VMs have the following limitations:

• 2GB is the minimum memory configuration for the operation of these new Virtual Machines.  Smaller memory configurations may encounter installation hangs.
•  At most, 3 virtual disks can be used by these new VMs.  Attempts to configure RHEL/CentOS 6.3 guests with more than 3 disks will not result in more disks being available to the VMs.