Friday, March 26, 2010

XenServer Install: The Install

The actual installation of Xen is very simple. There are however a few tricks I can recommend, that I had to do.
Be sure to firmware upgrade all of your hardware prior to installing. This is always recommended.

  1. Here is guide to installing: http://www.howtoforge.com/virtualization-with-xenserver-5.5.0
  2. If your CPU does not support VT (Virtualization Technology), you can still continue installation, but you can not install Windows guest OSes and your linux installs must be done with xen-patched linux kernels.
  3. When using the IDE CDROM drive I get "A base installation repository was not found at that location." The tutorial says you can then do a "modprobe ide-generic" from the console, but that did not help me. (Do not know why). So I connected a USB CDROM drive instead and installed from that. That works great.
  4. Use static IP on your management port, unless you have MAC reservation activated in your DHCP server
  5. find local NTP servers for time sync. Virtual machines drift quite alot in time, so it is important to have a master clock that is correct
  6. I got a question during install if I wanted all disks enabled as Storage Repository. DO NOT MARK ALL DRIVES. If you do it will merge all your disks together to one LVM, which is not good if you want to have control where the virtual disks are stored.
  7. Install the Linux pack CD as well. This is mandatory in my mind if you want to install Linux quests
  8. After install enable remote SSH, so you can work from your regular computer when doing all post config.

In my next blog entry, I will write about all the post-config and checking I had to do.
This includes:
- Network Speed troubleshooting
- Setup monitoring of the EX8350 RAID controller (so I receive emails when the RAID fails)

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