It's worth learning how to do Xen from the CLI in my opinion. Doing so will
also strengthen your general Linux sysadmin skills. Xen is an immensely
powerful tool and runs the bare metal hypervisors (on top of the Linux
kernel) of AWS and other large scale cloud things.
One of the prerequisites is setting up an LVM volume group to create
logical volumes inside of.
The "xl" CLI tool for xen is quite easy to use, and the basic template for
a Xen paravirtualized machine is not so hard... Here's a few things copied
and pasted from my notes. This is from my test and development xen machine
which runs debian jessie amd64.
sudo pvdisplay
[sudo] password for eric:
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/sda3
VG Name vg0
PV Size 101.27 GiB / not usable 4.46 MiB
Allocatable yes
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 25923
Free PE 2499
Allocated PE 23424
PV UUID 2Z7Kcr-doVc-S8L8-5ARa-d5BG-JGnt-V0pGgt
so we have a single partition on /dev/sda (a fast 128GB SSD) which is the
physical volume.
LVM always works like: Physical volume --> volume group --> logical volume
In this case it is really simple since we have only one volume group
defined on the physical volume /dev/sda3
sudo vgdisplay
--- Volume group ---
VG Name vg0
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 1
Metadata Sequence No 59
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 20
Open LV 19
Max PV 0
Cur PV 1
Act PV 1
VG Size 101.26 GiB
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 25923
Alloc PE / Size 23424 / 91.50 GiB
Free PE / Size 2499 / 9.76 GiB
VG UUID 3clHfR-6x0g-4TrE-c3WS-qqoS-3U17-7Y2UcR
so then the various logical volumes are created inside of that, here's what
the setup looks like for a requesttracker test machine:
if I do "sudo lvdisplay" and copy just the parts it spits out for a single
virtual machine:
--- Logical volume ---
LV Path /dev/vg0/requesttracker-swap
LV Name requesttracker-swap
VG Name vg0
LV UUID eyFYu1-wGgt-FwJH-0wAR-IIrp-1wvL-KGcljJ
LV Write Access read/write
LV Creation host, time mantu-dom0, 2014-09-06 21:07:49 -0700
LV Status available
# open 1
LV Size 2.00 GiB
Current LE 512
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
- currently set to 256
Block device 254:0
--- Logical volume ---
LV Path /dev/vg0/requesttracker-disk
LV Name requesttracker-disk
VG Name vg0
LV UUID jAwArd-MFSQ-h1pK-Kymc-VTwk-eYJE-2laTZm
LV Write Access read/write
LV Creation host, time mantu-dom0, 2014-09-06 21:08:31 -0700
LV Status available
# open 1
LV Size 14.00 GiB
Current LE 3584
Segments 2
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
- currently set to 256
Block device 254:1
each test and development virtual machine on this host has just two logical
volumes, one for the root disk and one for swap disk.
If I ssh into the requesttracker vm and look at its disks, /dev/xvda1 is
the swap disk and /dev/xvda2 is the root disk. These show up the same way a
/dev/sda physical device would.
The actual xen configuration of the VM is also for a debian jessie amd64 PV
machine, here's a copy and paste of its config file:
etc/xen/auto$ more requesttracker.cfg
#
# Configuration file for the Xen instance requesttracker, created
# by xen-tools 4.4 on Sat Sep 6 21:12:52 2014.
#
#
# Kernel + memory size
#
kernel = '/boot/vmlinuz-3.16.0-4-amd64'
extra = 'elevator=noop'
ramdisk = '/boot/initrd.img-3.16.0-4-amd64'
vcpus = '2'
memory = '512'
#
# Disk device(s).
#
root = '/dev/xvda2 ro'
disk = [
'phy:/dev/vg0/requesttracker-disk,xvda2,w',
'phy:/dev/vg0/requesttracker-swap,xvda1,w',
]
#
# Physical volumes
#
#
# Hostname
#
name = 'requesttracker'
#
# Networking
#
vif = [ 'ip=10.0.0.30 ,mac=00:16:3E:D8:70:6F,bridge=xenbr0' ]
#
# Behaviour
#
on_poweroff = 'destroy'
on_reboot = 'restart'
on_crash = 'restart'
On Fri, Nov 20, 2015 at 9:14 AM, David <dmilho...@wletc.com> wrote:
> I am doing a home brew vmhost at home and I am tossing around using XEN vs
> Vmware like I use at the office.
> From what I gather of Xen alot is done within the CLI but I am looking for
> a client like VMware host client that will
> give me the gui interface to manage host on XEN
>
> Any ideas or thoughts are welcome
>
> --
>
