I’ve been fighting xen for a few weeks now so sorry if this is old news but here’s what I ‘ve found, hope it helps a few.

 

1)      You cant run xen dom0 in vmware – not true it seems...?

 

Yes you can.   I did a lot of searching and found lots of ‘you cant’ it has to be bare metal to work but its not true.

 

BTW – you can search for days and not find anything on fedora / xen / clustering its really a hard time at the moment we
need to sort it out...

 

I was installing FC8 on VMware and trying everything but xen says on boot “relinquishing vga console”.  This is bad and means

when you later run virt-manager you will be only be offered qemu emulation and paravirtualization will not be available because

XEN didn’t really boot.

 

So I installed FC8 native straight on the hardware, and still the same thing happened, Xen wouldn’t boot properly and virt-manager

only offered my qemu emulation.  Some searching suggested machines with 4gb may be the problem so maybe it works for you but

FC8 out of the box does not work on my AMD 64X2 Nforce motherboard system with 5Gb ram.

 

My working machine ran FC7,    and the kernel-xen was kernel-xen......7.rpm     My FC8 was running kernel-xen.....7.3.  I removed

kernel-xen .....7.3 and installed the kernel-xen .....7.rpm from website rpmfind and now it booted and xen emulation was

available in virt-manager.    Virt-manger didn’t work first time so I had to give it a push with:

 

virt-manager –c xen:///system

 

and then all was good.   No longer was qemu the only option and I could create proper paravirtualized machines.

 

I wondered if the ‘vmware doesn’t work with xen’ was really true after this and sure enough, replacing

the FC8 kernel with the kernel-xen ....7 from fc7 also gave me proper dom0 emulation in vmware too.

 

Hope this helps someone.   Basically – its not always your fault you need the right mix of kernel and xen to support your hardware

and if you get the “xen relingquishing vga console” message on boot it means you don’t have xen working properly and need to

explore a different build for your hardware.

 

J.