To The Last Tribe Consulting

As I alluded to in my previous post, putting in an actual firewall in my home network (instead of the soho linksys “firewall”), was the first step in my plans for World Domination.  

I now reveal my second step:  

To build a home-server worthy of my use. 

I have just finished buying the last component for the new server–I will be putting Citrix XenServer on it, and be able to use the ensuing Virtual Machines for a couple things: 

-As I start working toward my GIAC Gold Certifications for my Silver GSEC, and soon-to-be silver GCIH, I needed a good Virtual Machine box that I can use for my research for the papers I will be writing.

-Research: I would like to be able to test out stuff like OSSIM and Spiceworks

-Finally, I would like to host a domain, possibly anapologetos.com on FreeBSD on the server–For practical experiance.

I will be writing a post in the next week detailing the specs and how the build went.

Josh

When I first heard that Citrix was releasing their flagship bare-metal hypervisor, XenServer for free, I was ecstatic.  This is quite obviously a gauntlet being slapped down on VMware’s table, with VMware’s ESXi being released for free just 6 months ago.  As a side note, Citrix’s timing was impeccable, as they released the news the day before one of VMware’s biggest user-community conferences,VMwareWorld Europe 2009 .

So, XenServer or ESXi?  Check out this table: (disclaimer, from the Citrix site)

Features included at no cost	Citrix XenServer	VMware ESXi
Bare-metal hypervisor	64-bit	32-bit
Max virtual CPUs	8	4
Windows® and Linux guests
Unlimited servers, VMs, memory
P2V & V2V conversion
Shared SAN and NAS storage
Centralized multi-server management
Resilient distributed management architecture
Live motion
Shared VM template library
Centralized configuration management
Virtual infrastructure patch management
Intelligent initial VM placement
Intelligent server maintenance mode
Fine-grained CPU resource controls
Hot-swappable disks and NICs

I was really hoping to be able to try out XenServer, but my home test box doesn’t have the needed requirements (64bit proc, etc), and I currently don’t have access to any test machines at the organization I serve with.  The only machine that comes close to the requirements is my personal laptop that is already dual-booting Ubuntu and Vista.  So I thought I would try to install it on external usb media.

The best exertnal media I could come up with was a old ide 2.5″,40GB hard drive I had pulled out of a laptop recently.  So, using a ide-2-usb adapter, I booted up the XenServer installer, making sure to select the external hard drive to install to.

After the reboot, expecting for the external drive to boot, I see XenServer starting to load, then a kernel panic, and a reboot.  Well, after watching this process for a minute, I was able to discover that the kernel was panicing because of something to to do with booting from a usb device.

After doing a  bit of googleing, I was able to find this guide, that helped me enable usb support in  intird to allow usb booting. (I did have to tweak the instructions a bit, since I was installing 5, and not 4.1)

After working this black magic, I got XenServer to boot on my laptop.  After installing the Xen client on another laptop, I was able to admin the server.

I really like it!

The biggest feature for me, and why I will be using it over ESXi, is that Citrix made the VM manager, XenCenter, free, instead of charging for it, like Vmware is doing with VMware Infrastructure 3.

I’m sure I will be blogging more about it, but I thought I would just post about the educational install!

Edit (05/09): As requested in a comment: To tweak the enabling usb support in initrd for 5.0 U3, I just had to use the updated filename for the primary initrd image file, instead of the quoted primary initrd image file, since it was for 4.1.

Josh