After the sad death of K T Ligesh I decided, like many people, to move away from HyperVM.
I searched and tried many control panels.
Openqrm – I found this over kill
karesansui – This is very nice looking and polished but seemed quite slow.
VDS Manager – Still in beta for Xen
I’ve now decided to create the VM’s by hand. I then hope to make a PHP control panel of my own. Here are my steps for creating Xen VPS’s using the command line and Centos 5.
I’m going to create a vm called testvm
First I needed to find out what Volume groups exist on my system and what the VG Name was
lvdisplay
VG Name VolGroup00
Create the disks for the VM and format
lvcreate -L8.5G -n testvm_rootimg VolGroup00
lvcreate -L 384M -n testvm_vmswap VolGroup00
mke2fs /dev/VolGroup00/testvm_rootimg
tune2fs -j /dev/VolGroup00/testvm_rootimg
mkswap /dev/VolGroup00/testvm_vmswap
mkdir /mnt/img
mkdir /mnt/vm
Now mount your disk image. I’ve created a custom hardened Centos distro, but you could use Jailtime Images
mount -o loop centos.5-3.64-smudge.img /mnt/img
mount /dev/VolGroup00/looop_rootimg /mnt/vm
Copy the image onto your new partition
cp -a /mnt/img/* /mnt/vm/
Now all you need to do is configure the hostname, ip etc on the VM.
vi /mnt/vm/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=87.xxx.xxx.xxx
NETMASK=255.255.255.xxx
ONBOOT=yes
Change the hostname
vi /mnt/vm/etc/sysconfig/network
If your using Jailtime images people have advised to change this line to the following:
vi /mnt/vm/etc/inittab
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty console
vi /mnt/vm/etc/ssh/sshd_config
PermitRootLogin yes
vi /mnt/vm/etc/fstab
Add the line:
/dev/sda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
umount /mnt/img /mnt/vm
You will need a ram disk to boot from. This can be created by running:
mkinitrd /boot/xen-guest-initrd `uname -r` –with xenblk –with xennet –preload xenblk –preload xennet –omit-scsi-modules
Now all you need to do is create the config file and give it an IP/ Mac address.Please check which kernel you are using first and change – kernel = “/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.1.14.el5xen”…
kernel = “/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-128.1.14.el5xen”
ramdisk = ‘/boot/xen-guest-initrd’
maxmem = 192
memory = 192
vcpus = 1
name = “testvm”
vif = [ 'ip=87.xxx.xxx.xxx,bridge=xenbr0, rate = 1000KB/s, mac=aa:00:23:b0:de:34' ]
serial = ‘pty’
disk = ['phy:/dev/VolGroup00/testvm_rootimg,sda1,w', 'phy:/dev/VolGroup00/testvm_vmswap,sda2,w']
root = ‘/dev/sda1 ro’
on_poweroff = ‘destroy’
on_reboot = ‘restart’
on_crash = ‘restart’
All is ready to go.
Just run:
xm create testvm
And you VPS should be now running:
check with
xm console testvm
Hope this helps.
Smudge IT will be lauching a new site and Xen Vps systems soon. Watch this space..
