8.2. Setting Up Your Virtual Systems
In order to work with virtual guest systems, you must first create a kickstart profile that will allow you to easily provision virtual guests, then you must provision the guests.
Log on to the Satellite's web interface. Navigate to the Kickstart Overview screen by clicking on the Manage Kickstarts link in the Tasks widget in Your RHN, or by clicking on Systems in the top navigation bar ⇒ Kickstart from the left navigation bar.
On the Kickstart Overview page, click the Create a new Kickstart Profile link in the Kickstart Actions widget in the upper right corner.
The next page displayed is Step 1 of the kickstart profile creation process:
Enter a label for the profile that will allow you to distinguish it from the other profiles. A good choice would be guest-system.
For the Base Channel field, select Red Hat Enterprise Linux $PRODUCT (v.5 for $ARCH) where $ARCH is the architecture of your host system's operating system and $PRODUCT is either Server or Client.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client 5 may not be available for selection if you did not sync the Client software channels to your Satellite.
Please note that the channel labels for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop refer to 'server' and 'client' respectively.
For the Kickstartable Tree field, you should select ks-rhel-$ARCH-$PRODUCT-5 where $ARCH is the architecture of your host system and $PRODUCT is either 'server' or 'client', depending on which product with which you would like to provision your guest.
Select Para-Virtualized Guest for the Virtualization Type field.
If you are changing the Virtualization Type of an existing kickstart profile, it may also modify the bootloader and partition options, potentially overwriting any user customizations. Be sure to review the Partitioning tab to verify these settings when changing the Virtualization Type.
Finally, click the button in the lower right of the screen to continue on to the next step.
For Step 2 of the kickstart profile creation process, select the location of the distribution files for the installation of your guest system. There should already be a Default Download Location filled out and selected for you on this screen. Click the button on this screen to continue to Step 3.
As in the previous step, if the default download location is missing, you may not have successfully synced software channel content to your Satellite from Red Hat's servers.
For Step 3 of the kickstart profile creation process, choose a root password for the guest system you are provisioning, and click to finish creation of the profile.
This completes kickstart profile creation. After completing Step 3 you should be taken to the profile details. You may browse through the various tabs of the profile and modify the settings as you see fit, but this is not necessary as the default settings should work well for the majority of cases. While the interface allows you to allocate less, we strongly recommend allocating at least 2 GB of storage for your guest system with this kickstart profile.