Installing Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahir) VM on a XenServer 6.2 host

I had a hard time getting Xenserver 6.2 to install a new VM with the latest long-term-support version of Ubuntu (14.04). The process documented below, pieced together from several posts, leads to a fairly straight-forward install.

Fix your pygrub on the Xenserver host

Based on this post, do the following:

Edit the file /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/grub/GrubConf.py.

Change line 428 from:

if arg.strip() == "${saved_entry}":

into:

if arg.strip() == "${saved_entry}" or arg.strip() == "${next_entry}":

Apparently this is patched in the xenserver sources, but no idea why there's no update to the release yet.

Create a new VM template for XenCenter

Now, make a new template that you can use in XenCenter to create a Ubuntu Trusty VM.

Execute the following 3 commands:

TEMPLATE_UUID=`xe template-list name-label="Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 (64-bit)" params=uuid --minimal`
NEW_TEMPLATE_UUID=`xe vm-clone uuid=$TEMPLATE_UUID new-name-label="Ubuntu Trusty 14.04 (64-bit)"`
xe template-param-set other-config:default_template=true other-config:debian-release=trusty uuid=$NEW_TEMPLATE_UUID

Create the VM from template using XenCenter

Now, run XenCenter on a Windows box, and go to VM -> New VM, and scroll down to this new template you created:

Next, when, prompted for install media, use the following URL:

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu

And follow the remaining steps in the normal way.

Category: Snippets

Tags: virtualization, linux