Important Post Installation Step
Make sure that you open the ports 8888 and 8887 in the firewall. Otherwise you won’t be able to connect to HyperVM.

HyperVm installation consists of downloading either the hypervm-install-master.sh or hypervm-install-slave.sh from download.lxlabs.com and executing them as root. They will download all the required files and do the complete installation on their own.

# wget http://download.lxlabs.com/download/hypervm/production/hypervm-install-master.sh
# sh ./hypervm-install-master.sh –virtualization-type=xen/openvz

You have to explicitly specify which virtualization type you want using the option –virtualization-type as either xen or openvz. When you run the command, you will presented with a menu from up2date, on which you can press <Enter>

If you are installing openvz, HyperVM will currently install the openVZ kernel, but will not switch the default kernel to it. You will have to manually edit the /etc/grub.conf, and change the ‘default=1′ to ‘default=0′, and reboot the machine. If you have chosen the xen kernel too, just check the grub.conf and see if the right kernel is the default, and you can reboot the machine.

If you are planning on using openvz, you will need to have a large ‘/’, since openvz creates the vpses in the ‘/vz’ directory. We are working on a ‘multiple location’ feature where you can provide a list of possible locations for vpses and hyperVM will automatically use the one with the most amount of free space, and this will be available in a week’s time. But for now, please provide a large enough ‘/’ for the vpses to be created.

Once the machine boots back, just make sure you have the openVZ kernel by doing a ‘uname -a‘, and after that you can connect to ‘http://your-hostname:8888‘, and you will be presented with a login screen - the password would be ‘admin’. Once you login, HyperVM will explicitly force you to change the password to something other than ‘admin’.

For those installing Xen, please read these extra notes, and make sure that you meet all the requirements:
# Note: Although the notes below will fall under recommended best practices for installing your server, they are mandatory only if you are installing Xen, and if you are planning on installing openvz, then you can skip them without any issue.

# The boot loader must be grub. Grub is a much more flexible and mature boot loader, and it is actually a good idea to use it rather than lilo.
# There must be a separate /boot partition. You can assign it 200MB.
# The default virtualization for hyperVM is openvz. So after installation of Xen, you will have to manually select it in the driver setup. Go to admin -> servers -> server home -> driver home and there for ‘virtual machine’, change the value from openvz to xen, and update.

If you want to have a cluster, you have to run ‘hypervm-install-slave.sh‘ in all the servers that you intend to make as slaves. Once ‘hypervm-install-slave.sh‘ is completed, you can add the server from the ‘add server’ page in the master’s server page. From then on, you can manage every aspect of Virtualization through intuitive graphical interface.

Upgrading hyperVM very straightforward. The ‘update home’ page will show you the latest version of hyperVM available, and the ‘release notes’ listing will tell you the changes that happened since your version, in a very clear format - the bug fix/security fix/feature additions all will be displayed in different colors and clearly identifiable in the listing. This wil help you in making a decision about how critical is the upgradation of hypervm, and how soon it should be updated. The release notes will also contain any special information the user should know after the upgradation is done.