To The Last Tribe Consulting

This is the second part in my Commodity XenServer series.  Check out Part 1 here.

The XenServer Install

Now that I had the basic system  stable and ready to roll, I fired up the XenServer install CD.  (At this point, I was running a SATA hardrive, with an IDE DVD-ROM Drive.)  

The installer would run fine up until the point where I had to choose where I wanted to install from.  When I selected the local DVD drive, I would get the error message, “Base installation repository was not found at that location. Please check and try again.”  

After searching the Citrix support forums, I found that other people were having the same issue, but nobody had any answers yet.  So I did a ton of troubleshooting:

-I re-downloaded and burned another copy of the installer

-I tried installing via FTP and NFS

-I disabled all non-essential BIOS functions

-I removed all non-essential hardware

None of these worked, but I got a tip from the Citrix forums–That the issue probably had something to do with hard disks/SATA/IDE.  So I tried disabling all unused IDE/SATA channels, which was a no go.

 I then swapped out the IDE DVD drive for a SATA DVD drive and disabled all IDE channels on the motherboard–And it worked!

I posted my results in this Citrix forum thread.  

As I’m looking at the thread, it looks like there is another workaround, without having to go to SATA: (From the thread)

After starting the install and selecting the keyboard …

1) Hit Alt+F2 to switch to another console window
2) enter “modprobe ide-generic” return
3] switch back to the install window by hitting Alt+F1

After I got this issue worked out, everything else fell into place, and I came up with a working XenServer 5.0 Update 3 install.

The only other issuing I am still having is that the onboard NIC is realtek, and I can’t seem to get working drivers–This is not a big deal though, since I threw in a Netgear NIC I had laying around, and then bought an Intel Pro dual-nic PCI card, which XenServer had drivers for out-of-the-box.

This wraps up the Xen-Server install, which I am happy to say is humming along just fine with 5 VMs currently active.

Josh