[HOWTO] Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS on XenServer in PV mode

[webman]

Installing Ubuntu on Citrix XenServer is fine; but to get better performance it should be running paravirtualised (PV) instead of hardware virtualised (HVM - the default). Ubuntu isn't natively supported, so it needs a bit of manual work to achieve it.

I've put together a page on our wiki that details the steps needed to get it up and running in PV mode and get the XenServer tools installed (and running at start-up!).

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS paravirtualised on Citrix XenServer [Bishop Barrington IT Wiki]

If you spot any mistakes please correct me.

Enjoy.

[dhicks]

Installing Ubuntu on Citrix XenServer is fine; but to get better performance it should be running paravirtualised (PV) instead of hardware virtualised (HVM - the default).

Many thanks - I tried to get Ubuntu 9.10 running paravirtualised but gave up in the end and used Debian instead as there was a compiled kernel available for it. I'll maybe give that a go for our new Moodle server.

--
David Hicks

[webman]

I had thought about going Debian too, but prefer the LTS versions of Ubuntu for simplicity and duration of updates, as well as "harmonising" all our Linux servers to one distro.

[vonObelix]

Thanks for that howto - I was able to install Lucid (64bit) in PV-mode.
Everything works fine, except the console.

It shows as expected:

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS ubuntu64tpl hvc0

ubuntu64tpl login:

But it doesn't accept any keystrokes in XenCenter.

Has anybody a solution?

[UDATE] REstarting XenCenter worked for me.

[webman]

UPDATE: If you're now running XenServer 5.6 like we are, I discovered a post explaining a much simpler method using templates. Download a bash script to the pool master, run it to generate the template, and then create your VM from it. It's a netinst version (so will use the Internet) so I'd recommend changing the mirror to gb.archive.ubuntu.net. All the PV mode stuff and XenServer Tools just work - no messing around with config files at all.

Installing Ubuntu Server 10.04 (32bit and 64bit) LTS » XenServer - Citrix Community