I have installed XenServer recently, but didn't stick with it. I am familiar with Ubuntu and was reading you can install XenHypervisor as a standalone package inside a Ubuntu OS. Kind of like installing Hyper-V on windows server instead of installing Hyper-V Server. The reason I stayed away from KVM is that I couldn't find a good GUI for management, but I liked XenCenter GUI for XenServer.

My question is:

If I installed Ubunutu Server 14.04 and then follow this guide to install xen-hypervisor-amd64 could I use the XenCenter windows application to view/manage the Xen Hypervisor?

1 Answer

Have a look at LibVirt and VirtManager, both completely free alternatives to XenCenter, and they support more hypervisors than Xen alone.

Ubuntu Server 14.04 should have the packages readily available via

 apt-get install libvirt0 virt-manager

Once done, fire up VirtManager from the command line with virt-manager. It should connect to your Xen daemon immediately if you're running Xen 4.2+ (where xl is the default toolstack).

If you're not running Xen 4.2+ (or are using xm as the toolstack), then you'll have to modify a few lines in /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp in order for LibVirt to connect to Xen:

 (xend-http-server yes) (xend-port 8000)

After making the above changes, run service xen restart and then run service libvirt-bin restart (or service libvirtd restart if libvirt-bin doesn't work). VirtManager should now connect successfully to Xen.

HOWEVER

If you really want XenCenter to work with your configuration, you will need to install the XCP/XAPI packages in the Ubuntu repository. These packages contain the xe (XenServer) toolstack to communicate with Xen, but they are heavily outdated and no longer maintained. They may have already been removed from the Ubuntu 14.04 repository as well.

More info on XCP/XAPI can be found here:

XCP/_XAPI_Overview

aims to provide the ability to install the XAPI toolstack onto a pre-existing OS deployment

Hope this helps

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