Convirt: transform a VM from HVM to PV
We recently reinstalled our main server. It’s a Xen 4.0.1 host, based on Debian Squeeze. We don’t have many VM on it, it’s basically to save some power and have a sandbox for some test installations. Can be useful, quite often.
Instead of using plain CLI tools (xen-tools basically), I decided to give a try to one of the most well known interfaces for Xen: Convirt. Formerly xenman, born some years ago, at some time it moved to a commercial software, with open source base. Can be installed on custom host, as in my case, or downloaded as VM appliance!
Beside all considerations, it’s quite cool, even if I find documentation a bit lacking, the forum has some nice people. Not really as much as I’d like, but useful.
Xen4 dom0 and Grub2
I’ve recently installed a Debian Squeeze system with Xen4. Since the pretty new mix of Grub2 and Xen, I’ve had little problems finding around how to apply the dom0_mem option to boot command line.
To add the usual dom0 options to kernel command line, just edit /etc/defaults/grub and add a line as follows:
GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN_DEFAULT="dom0_mem=256M nosmp"
After that, obviously run update-grub.
It wasn’t very hard, but found no examples so far. 
| Posted in Linux | No Comments »