How to make sure a xen DomU is HVM or PV

Question

i used virt-install to create a DomU image, but i cannot make sure the DomU created is a HVM or a PV.....anyone has any ideas?

Answer 1

Run

virsh edit VM_NAME

Then look for the element inside the element. If the value is linux is PVM.

Answer 2

On Citrix XenServer 6.2, looking at all the parameters of the VM you'll see refferences to PV or HVM:

# xe vm-list name-label=myVM params=all|grep PV-[kd]
                     PV-kernel ( RW): 
            PV-drivers-version (MRO): major: 6; minor: 2; micro: 0; build: 70442
         PV-drivers-up-to-date ( RO): true

It turns out, in case of a linux VM, you can see if its PV:

[myVM]$ dmesg | egrep "Booting|Xen ver"
Booting paravirtualized kernel on Xen
Xen version: 4.1.5 (preserve-AD)

I'm not quite sure why PV-kernel does not reflect this. For more details see determine-which-guest-is-running-on-xen-hvm-or-pv-guest and is-there-an-os-command-i-can-run-to-determine-if-running-inside-a-xen-based-virt.

Answer 3

If your Dom0 is a linux machine , can you please check the output of command "ps -eaf | grep qemu" ? It should state the type of guest running on it (in case it is xen hypervisor that is being used).

The output corresponding to pv guest machine will end with "-M xenpv" and output corresponding to hvm/pvhvm guest machines should end with "-M xenfv". This is what i find in my case.

 # ps -eaf | grep qemu

    /usr/lib/xen/bin/qemu-dm -d 419 -serial pty -domain-name pvm_guest -videoram 4 -vnc 0.0.0.0:0 -vncunused -M xenpv

    /usr/lib/xen/bin/qemu-dm -d 429 -domain-name hvm_guest -videoram 4 -k en-us -vnc 0.0.0.0:0 -vncunused -vcpus 1 -vcpu_avail 0x1 -boot c -serial pty -acpi -net nic,vlan=1,macaddr=00:16:3e:40:94:4f,model=rtl8139 -net tap,vlan=1,ifname=tap429.0,bridge=br0 -M xenfv