Xen VMs for Puppet course
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Xen VMs for Puppet course

Jurjen Bokma

November 2013

Abstract

I needed a couple of virtual hosts and a virtual network to complete a Puppet course. I can play with an 8-core 32GB RAM server, having a 1GB/s network connection. It runs Wheezy, and there's a 73GB disk free. So I put Xen on it. Here's how I did it.

Table of Contents

Installing Xen
LVM space for virtual hosts
A virtual Network
Creating a Xen Virtual Machine
Many VMs
Nameserving the Virtual Network

Installing Xen

  1. Install the packages

    (First run egrep '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo to see whether this machine supports hardware virtualization so we may run Windows easily.)

    apprentice@server:~$ sudo apt-get install xen-linux-system xen-tools debootstrap cdebootstrap openxenmanager virt-top libvirt-bin virt-goodies virtinst

  2. Boot Xen instead of Linux by default

    apprentice@server:~$ sudo dpkg-divert --divert /etc/grub.d/08_linux_xen --rename /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen
    apprentice@server:~$ update-grub

  3. Have xend start at all

    Without the following, xend doesn't start.

    apprentice@server:~$ sudo sed -i 's/xend-unix-server\ no/xend-unix-server yes/g' /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp

  4. Reboot into Xen

    apprentice@server:~$ sudo reboot

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