Runnning XEN on ASUS X54C under Debian

Submitted by Richard on Mon, 12/31/2012 - 08:42

I had a need to verify a new puppet configuration and wanted my own puppet master and client server to do this.  And, I wanted to be able to work on this when I was mobile.  
 
Solution: Run a debian XEN host and two Virtual Machines on the ASUS X54C laptop.
 
First up, virtualization is only feasible if you have a CPU that has extended instructions.  My ASUS X54C comes with Intel Celeron B820 chip.  To check, as root   grep vmx /proc/cpuinfo.  (aside: the AMD check is grep svm /proc/cpuinfo).
 
I installed the following packages:
# apt-get install xen-linux-system xen-qemu-dm-4.0 qemu-kvm libvirt-bin
 
(If you like using GUI, consider installing "Virtual Machine Manager" as well).
 
The grub configuration will be updated, and booting a XEN enabled kernel will be presented.
 
However, I had an issue where the X login screen would not appear.  After a bit of research, there appears to be a known issue between XEN and X (bugs.debian.org id=646987) , so I had to alter the grub linux boot command to use "nopat" in order to get the X login screen when running the XEN kernel.
 
With only 2 Gb of memory, you wont be able to create full desktop GUI VM's.  I was able to build two debian VMs without GUI desktop and have them boot and remain usable for what I needed to do.  (Actually, they run pretty darn good in my opinion).
 
I specified each VM to have 256 Mbytes of memory, and built the first via the network http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/squeeze/main .  The second VM I built using the virt-clone command.  (Be sure to specify a unique MAC address).
 
An issue I had is that virt-manager would not connect.  In /etc/xen/xend-config.sexp , I had to change xend-unix-server to yes and uncomment xend-unix-path /var/lib/xend/xend-socket).
 
This is an absolutely great way for someone to inexpensively learn about XEN, virt-manager and the power of Virtual Machines.  I configured one of the VMs as a puppet master server and the other as a puppet client.  Now I can code and test away as I like without worry of harming my main image.  Happy Virtualization !
 
 

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