Halleluja! Thanks Novell for hearing my p2v praise!

I’ve read some very good news today: Novell is buying platespin

February 25th, 2008 - Posted in Novell, xen | | 0 Comments

xen p2v migrations

Dear lazyweb,

Do you know any good free tools to do p2v migrations to a xen environment. (HVM would be a bonus)

There are enough manuals, howtos, wiki pages, … with all the necessary steps to migrate your physical machines to a xen virtual machine. I even wrote some scripts to automate this (but only for linux).

I only found solutions like platespin and the XenEnterprise p2v tool.

Someone also suggested to fiddle around with the vmware converter tool and some qemu magic to convert the vmware virtual disk. But the vmware converter only seems to be available as an .exe

Any suggestions?

Edit: I recently discovered http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v/

February 11th, 2008 - Posted in xen | | 3 Comments

Xen doesn’t like my cdrom

I’m using xen in quite a lot environments and i really like it but there is this 1 thing about xen that still annoys me.

As soon as you need to start changing cdrom’s for a virtual machine the problems start. Especially in combination with HVM.

virt-manager is a real pain to do this so I’m using the xm block-* commands most of the time.

To detach a cdrom from a virtual machine

First do a xm block-list vm_name to get the list of the connected devices (with their ids)

xm block-detach vm_name id -f

and afterwards you can re-attach the cdrom again

xm block-attach vm_name phy:/dev/cdrom /dev/hdc r

Is there someone who knows a better solution when you want to switch cds ?

December 18th, 2007 - Posted in linux, xen | | 1 Comments

SLES10 SP1 xen

When upgrading your SLES10 to SP1 you will notice that if you attach a (virtual) console to your xen machine it will stop showing output after booting. This is due to a switch to paravirtualized framebuffer as of SP1.

You can fix this by adding ‘xencons=tty’ to the extra line of your xen configuration. A restart is needed after changing this file.

Check TID 3029036 from Novell

August 12th, 2007 - Posted in SLES, xen | | 0 Comments

Testing results

Last week I had some time to test 2 of the things that were on my todo test list

1) Groupwise on xen

Starting from GW 7.0.2 xen is officially a supported environment. Because it was released last week I took the time to try it out and it seems to work quite ok. So if you are interested on running Groupwise on Xen give it a try

If you want to run eDirectory in the same virtual machine you have to make sure that you use edir 8.8 sp1.

2) Opensuse build service

A while ago Novell/SuSE made an announcement that they would release OpenSUSE build service in open source. This is a framework which can be used to build (binary) packages for different distributions out of 1 source archive. The nice thing is that you can even build deb and rpm packages at the same time.

It uses a client/server model and the building of the packages can be distributed over different machines. (e.g different machine for all architectures)

On the client side you can use a client (osc) which is written in python and uses a svn alike syntax

Very usefull beast that will save us a lot of time!

April 25th, 2007 - Posted in Novell, xen | | 0 Comments

p2v site

The p2v project on developer.novell.com is approved , so we now have a small web page.

http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/P2v

While the subversion repository is at https://forgesvn1.novell.com/viewsvn/p2v/trunk/

If you are interested in this and want commit access you can always drop me a mail.

January 19th, 2007 - Posted in linux, xen | | 0 Comments

More p2v…

Jo De Baer did some extra hacking on the p2v script which I released a while ago.
It’s nice to see other people can actually use this thing and are contributing to it. (Thx Jo!)
I’ll post the diff asap. We are also trying to create a project for it on forge.novell.com which makes it easier to track development,changes and feedback.

More documentation will be added as soon as I have some time.

January 15th, 2007 - Posted in linux, xen | | 0 Comments

Debian guest on sles10 host

Successfully deployed a debian sarge guest on top of a sles10 installation.

It went quite easy , here are the steps (briefly)

• mkdir /var/li/xen/images/vm1
• dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/lib/xen/images/vm1/hda
• mkfs.ext3 /var/lib/xen/images/vm1/hda
• repeat the previous steps to create other partitions like swap (mkswap)
• mkdir /mnt/tmp-root
• mount -o loop /var/lib/xen/images/vm1/hda /mnt/tmp-root
• install debootstrap: rpm -i http://leo.unstable.be/projects/sles10/xen/debootstrap-0.2.45-1.2.i386.rpm
• debootstrap –arch i386 sarge /mnt/tmp-root ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ ( minus minus arch)
• chroot /mnt/tmp-root
• make sure you configure networking , hostnames , fstab , apt inside this chroot
• files to check and modify: /etc/hosts , /etc/hostname , /etc/fstab , /etc/network/interfaces , /etc/apt/sources.list
• install module-init-tools
• exit from the chroot
• cp /boot/initrd-xen /mnt/tmp-root/boot
• cp /boot/vmlinuz-xen /mnt/tmp-root/boot
• cp -r /lib/modules/`uname-r` /mnt/tmp-root/lib/modules
• Offcourse your initrd should use the correct root device (can be re-created with mkinitrd)
• create a xen config under /etc/xen/vm
• make sure your configuration uses the right disk file and the correct bootloader line
• launch your vm for the first time with xm create -c /etc/xen/vm/vm1

That’s about it.

November 8th, 2006 - Posted in SLES, xen | | 0 Comments

Xen physical 2 virtual

I just hacked up a shell script which makes it possible to create a virtual machine out of

your running physical machine. After running this script you have the virtual disk and a configuration which can be started

with xm create -c /etc/xen/vm/

This is currently only tested with sles10 but with some small modifications it should also work in other environments.

Following steps are done by the script.

1. Check on which partition your / is mounted

2. Check which partition is your swap partition

3. Check sizes of both partitions and see if there is still enough availble space to create the virtual disk

4. Create a virtual disk image

5. Create partitions+filesystem on the virtual disk image

6. Copy all your data of your physical machine to the virtual disk image

7. Generate a xen configuration for your machine

This is still the first version of the script so there are still some ‘known issues’

- you already need to have the xen-kernel installed on your physical machine

- it only creates a / and a swap partition , no other partitions yet

- it (temp) creates the image file under /tmp before moving it to /var/lib/xen/images

- does not work with lvm (only loop devices)

You can find the script here

November 2nd, 2006 - Posted in SLES, xen | | 0 Comments