Well this article aims to compare RedHat Fedora, CentOS and Debian Ubuntu from an administrator point of view. How to Create and Install Guest Virtual Machines in Xen. Server. Continuing to move forward with the Xen. Server series, this article will approach the creation of the actual guests themselves often called virtual machines. Update In May 2. Citrix released the new version of the Xen. Server 7 platform. For installation follow Fresh Installation of Xen. Backtrack 5 R3 Iso Highly Compressed. VMware_workstation_12_configure_the_package_manager_http_proxy_screenshot.jpg' alt='Install Kali Tools On Debian Wheezy Linux' title='Install Kali Tools On Debian Wheezy Linux' />Server 7. Create and Install Guest Virtual Machines in Xen. Server. This article will assume all the previous articles covering networking, patching, and storage have been completed. Thankfully, no more new terminology really needs to be discussed and the creation of the guests can begin System Review. At this point, a lot has been configured on this Xen. Server host. This will serve as a quick review about what has been configured and which article the topic was discussed. Xen. Server 6. 5 was installed to the serverhttps www. Install Kali Tools On Debian Wheezy IsoStep by step guide on how to install CentOS 6. Screenshots are also included. All Xen. Server 6. Network interface teaming and VLANs were createdhttps www. SCSI and ISO storage repositories were created to hold operating system installation files and the virtual harddisks used by the guestshttps www. Creation of Virtual Guests in Xen. Server. This portion of the guide will be relying on ISO installers to actually boot the newly created guest machine and install an operating system. Be sure to review the fourth article for information on creating an ISO repository. Xen. Server comes with a series of templates that can be used to quickly provision a virtual guest. These templates provide common options for the chosen operating system. Options include things such as hard drive space, CPU architecture, and amount of ram available among other options. These options can be manually modified later but for now a simple template will be used to illustrate their usage. To obtain the list of available templates, the traditional xe command can be passed different arguments to prompt the system to return the templates available. This command is likely to return a lot of output. To make the output easier to read, it is suggested that the output be piped into less as follows xe template list less. This will allow for easier parsing of the available templates to locate the necessary UUID information. This article is going to be working with Debian 8 Jessie but will require the use of the older Debian 7 Wheezy template until Citrix releases the new template. Selecting Debian 7 wont affect anything in the operation of the actual operating system. The screen shot below used the UUID in the command to trim out some of the normal output. Check Xen. Server Template List xe sr list name labelTecmint i. SCSI Storage. List Xen. Server Storage Label Name. With this UUID, all of the initial information to setup this guest has been obtained. As with almost everything in Xen. Server, another xe command will be used to provision the new guest. Debian Wheezy 7. Tecmint. VM sr uuidbea. Xen. Server Guest Template Creation. The highlighted UUID is the UUID of the newly provisioned guest. There are a couple of house keeping steps that can potentially make things easier in the future. The first is to provide a name label to the newly created VDI and the second is modifying any of the default hardware specifications provisioned by the template. To see why it would be important to name the VDI, take a look at what the system will automatically assign to the VDI when provisioned using the following xe commands xe vbd list vm name labelTecmint. VM Used to get the VDI UUID. Used to show naming issue. Check Xen. Server VDI Name and UUIDAnother option available is to gather both pieces of information is the following command xe vm disk list vmTecmint. VM. List Virtual Machine Disk Information. The part in yellow is the concern. To many people this issue is minor but for house keeping purposes a more descriptive name is desired to keep track of the purpose of this particular VDI. To rename this particular VDI, the UUID in the above output is needed and another xe command needs to be created. Tecmint. VM Disk 0 VDI. Tecmint. VM. Rename VDI Name Label. This may seem trivial to set but from experience, this has prevented a serious issue when detaching a storage repository from one Xen. Server and attempting to attach it to another Xen. Server. This particular scenario, a metadata backup of all the guest information failed to be restore able on the new Xen. Server and thankfully by naming the VDI on each of the guests, proper mapping of the guest to its VDI was able to be done simply by the name label. The next house keeping step for this article is to provide this particular guest with more resources. As provisioned this guest will only have about 2. Mi. B Mebibytes worth of memory. Most guests this isnt enough so it is beneficial to know how to increase a guests available memory. As with anything in Xen. Server this can be accomplished with xe commands. Check Xen. Server Guest Memory List. The box in green above indicates that the most memory that this particular guest could ever have is about 2. Mi. B. For testing purposes this would be okay but for any sort of heavy use system, this would prove to be insufficient. To modify this value to give the guest access to more RAM, a simple xe command can be issued with the guest powered off. In this example, the amount of ram to be given to this machine will be represented in bytes but will equal 2 Gibibytes worth of ram. Tecmint. VM. Notice that this will reserve two Gi. B of ram for this guest all the time. Increase Xen. Server Guest Memory Limit. Now this particular guest is ready to have an operating system installed. From the previous article about Storage Repositories, a Samba share was added to this Xen. Server to store ISO installer files. This can be confirmed with the following xe command xe sr list name labelRemote ISO Library on lt servername ISO. List Xen. Server Samba Share Directory. Be sure to replace lt servername with the name of the proper Samba server for the environment in which this configuration is taking place. Once the Xen. Server is confirmed to see the ISO storage repository, a virtual CD ROM needs to be added to the guest in order to boot the ISO file. This guide will assume that the Debian Net Installer ISO exists on the ISO storage repository. Check Guest ISO in Xen. Server ISO Storage xe vm cd add vmTecmint. VM cd namedebian 8 netinst. Tecmint. VM userdevice3. Add Guest ISO to Xen. Server. The above commands first list out the name for the Debian ISO. The next command will add a virtual CD ROM device to the Tecmint. VM guest and assigns it the device ID of 3. The third command is used to determine the UUID for the newly added CD ROM to continue setting up the device to boot the Debian ISO. The next step is to make the CD ROM bootable as well as instruct the guest to install an operating system from the CD ROM. The first command above sets the CD ROM to be bootable by using its UUID highlighted in green in the above screen shot. The second command instructs the guest to use the CD ROM as the method for installing the operating system. The UUID for the Tecmint guest is highlight in the above screen shot in yellow. Install Guest Operating System in Xen. Server. The last step in setting up the guest is to attach a virtual network interface VIF. This is especially important for this install method since the Debian Network installer is being used and will need to pull packages from the Debian repositories. Looking back at the Xen. Server networking article, a special VLAN was already created for this guest and it was VLAN 1. Using xe the necessary network interface can be created and assigned to this guest. Tecmint test VLAN 1.