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XenServer Tips and Tricks – Auto Start Your VM

Posted on the January 28th, 2012 under Interesting,Tutorials,Xen,XenServer by John

Figured I’d share a few of my notes from firing up a XenServer instance…  I went through lot of research before deciding to go with XenServer versus just firing up Xen on Debian, but thats for another post. The main reason I setup this server was to move off of Linode because I was at the point where it just made sense cost wise, essentially I have a more powerful server for way less money.  Granted, you do loose some of the conveniences of Linode  (simple management/upgrade/backup).  Anyways, onto XenServer…

When using the free edition of XenServer 6.0, you’ll want to do a few things such as enabling Auto Start / Auto Boot / Auto Power On.  For some reason this feature was removed from the “Free” version in 6.0, so lets go ahead and set this up.

First your going to want to get the UUID of the VM’s you wish to enable auto start on as well as the UUID of the pool these VM’s reside in.

To get the list of the pool’s on your XenServer type:

xe pool-list

Copy the UUID of the pool, in my case there ist just one pool. Then issue the following command, and replace the UUID with your pools UUID.

xe pool-param-set uuid=UUID other-config:auto_poweron=true

Then, at the command prompt of your XenServer type:

xe vm-list

You should get a full list of the VM’s on the server, along with their name and UUID. Copy the UUID of the VM you wish to enable autostart then issue the command below, again replacing the UUID with the UUID of the VM you wish to auto start.

xe vm-param-set uuid=UUID other-config:auto_poweron=true

And thats it, the next time you ever need to power cycle your main server, the Xen instances should power up automatically.

I’ll be adding a few more articles over the next few weeks of some other notes and tips.  Next up is adding some monitoring to your main XenServer to see whats going on with your different instances.

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