Xen

Convert Xen XVA to KVM

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Citrix Xen uses a custom virtual appliance format for import/export called “XVA”. it’s basically a strangely crafted tar-file. You don’t need this program to unpack this tar-file, just use your favourite tar unpacker (tar, gtar, bsdtar). Once unpacked you will end up with a lot of different files, ova.xml (which contains the settings for the virtual appliance, think VMware vmx) and a number of folders called Ref:/, this is your disks. Each of these folders contain hundreds of files named 00000000, 00000001 with a accompanying .CHECKSUM file (SHA1). Each file is a 1MB slice of the disk, but some of the files in the sequence will probably be missing this is because XVA do not use compression; instead it will exclude slices of the disk that only contains zeros (are empty). This tool can assemble the disk for you (you will end up with a RAW disk) that can easily be mounted and modified. It can then also split the file again and generate checksum. Once ready, you will probably want to use the “package” command to rebuild the XVA file.

I’m running this conversion into a Debian 11 Server. First thing, you need to install xvz-img package from git repo into Debian server. Let’s install some essential package first-

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XOA on XCP-NG import and install

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Start a new SSH session to your XenServer host and run the commands below.

### Using curl ###
[18:18 xcp-node-01 ~]# bash -c "$(curl -sS https://xoa.io/deploy)"
### Using wget ###
[18:18 xcp-node-01 ~]# bash -c "$(wget -qO- https://xoa.io/deploy)"

If you are using an old XenServer version, you may encounter SSL connection issues. This can bypassed by using the unsecure connection instead:

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Force stop xen vm using command line

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Instructions

  1. Disable High Availability (HA) so you don’t run into issues.
  2. Log into the Xenserver host that is running your VM with issues via ssh or console via XenCenter. Run the following command to list VMs and their UUIDs 
    xe vm-list resident-on=<uuid_of_host>
  3. First you can try just the normal shutdown command with force 
    xe vm-shutdown uuid=<UUID from step 3> force=true
  4. If that just hangs, use CONTROL+C to kill it off and try to reset the power state.  The force is required on this command 
    xe vm-reset-powerstate uuid=<UUID from step 3> force=true
  5. If the VM is still not shutdown, we may need to destroy the domain.  Run this command to get the domain id of the VM.  It is the number in the first row of output. The list will be the VMs on the host.  Dom0 will be the host itself and all numbers after are running VM 
    list_domains

Now run this command using the domain ID from the output of step 7

xl destroy <DOMID from step 7>

To start the VM use-

xe vm-start name-label=$VMN
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Running pfSense in a XenServer with xenguest

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If you deploy pfSense on a XenServer, you may be shocked at the performance loss-specially on interface speed! But wait, there are some tweaks to make this usable.

Installing pfSense

Go ahead and setup pfSense like normal, and when you are done, perform the following tweaks. (the day till it’s tested on pfsense version 2.5.2 and xen on scp-ng 8.1)

XenServer tweaks

Find UUID for the pfSense VM you just installed.

xe vm-list

You should get something like the following

uuid ( RO) : b435d920-eb22-b45d-5058-091619ed427f
name-label ( RW): pfSense
power-state ( RO): running

uuid ( RO) : 42626f69-6185-4aa6-a125-839700f96828
name-label ( RW): Control domain on host: xenserver-000
power-state ( RO): running

We want the UUID of the instance running pfSense, b435d920-eb22-b45d-5058-091619ed427f in this case.

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Export/ Import VM to/from a backup file using command line on XenServer

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Identify VM’s UUID

We start by identifying a virtual machine we would lake to export to as a regular backup file. Run xe vm-list to list all available virtual machines and take a note of the virtual machine in question:

# xe vm-list
uuid ( RO) : 7371124f-7d4d-66b7-cbc7-a98b1457543e
name-label ( RW): Debian Jessie 8.5
power-state ( RO): halted

uuid ( RO) : bad8e456-df88-435d-ba12-3f0f6e54b2c6
name-label ( RW): Control domain on host: xenserver
power-state ( RO): running

Take VM snapshot

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How to Add Additional Physical NICs to XenServer

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From the XenServer Command Line Interface (CLI), issue the following command:

xe pif-list

Press Enter.

Note: If you have more than one XenServer in the pool, you must issue the xe host-list command to list all the XenServer hosts and write down the Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) of the host that you added the new NIC, then issue command xe pif-list host-uuid=[uuid of the XenServer host]

The preceding command lists all the physical NICs of that XenServer. If you do not see the additional NIC, you must scan for new physical interface(s) on a XenServer and issue this command:

xe pif-scan host-uuid=[uuid of the XenServer host]

Press Enter.

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