Cymen's Blog

This is a work in progress and I’m still testing some things but here are a few ideas:

1. Use the GPL Paravirtualization drivers
2. Disable the login screen saver

This basic approach works:

1. Power down target system.
2. Create another logical volume the same size as the target system.
3. dd if=/dev/$PV/$TARGET of=/dev/$PV/$CLONE bs=1M
4. Copy Xen config and modify with clone details
5. Power up clone, change hostname and any other relevant details
6. Power up target

For a 32 GB LV, dd took just over 11 minutes to dump the data from the target volume to the clone volume on my hardware. This was for a Windows Server 2003 clone using DHCP so the only thing I changed was the host name (so far).

I’d think the LVM snapshot method might be able to do this more intelligently but I couldn’t quite grok it right away and this method worked.

I got a Windows Server 2003 Xen DomU up and running within a couple hours. The configuration was fairly simple but the issue I ran into with Debian Lenny was that that Xen defaults to xenbr0 as the network bridge interface while eth0 is the correct one to to use. After modifying /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp (actually, I first stated the bridge explicitly in my DomU configuration), networking worked and the VM fired up with the regular install screens. The integration with VNC works very well.

The next step after all the OS updates was to install the Windows paravirtual drivers. I used gplpv_fre_wnet_x86_0.10.0.69.msi and the VM rebooted after install without issue except for the IntelIde drivers/service failing to load (guessing it just needs to be disabled — not critical as far as I can tell).

So far, with my DomU installs, I’ve been doing it the hard way by which I mean I’ve been reinstalling from scratch with each new DomU. Next on the list is to clone a VM using LVM snapshots which should be much easier (and reduce all that update downloading and configuration).

Update: Indeed, the IntelIde startup error is apparently fixed (hidden properly) in Xen 3.4!