I came across xen-tools, but its mainly for Debian based systems. It does have some tools to assist in deploying rpm based systems, but they appear to be clunky. The required rinse tool basically downloads packages twice to do the install. Why?

There is also the Red Hat provided Virtual Machine Manager which is GUI based. I like to stick to command line, but that’s OK since they have a tool called virt-install that will either prompt you for information or will accept arguments to configure the new DomU. The issue here is that virt-install creates the sxp file in /var/lib/xend/domains/(hex number)/ making it impossible to restart the machine after it has been started, as well as place a copy in the /etc/xen/auto folder for automatic startup at boot. However, there is a tool to parse the sxp formatted configuration file, back to the normal format… but its an extra step. Why can’t it just use the simple configuration file format from the start?

All I want is a simple tool that I can throw a few arguments at such as hostname and ip addreess to pass to kickstart, something I can have create the LVM partitions for me, and something that will properly output the configuration file to /etc/xen. Why is this so hard and why has this not been done yet?