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Announcing TurnKey Xen optimized builds

Xen LogoAs we mentioned before, making TurnKey easy to deploy on as many public and private clouds is an important goal for the project.

Recently we announced TurnKey optimized builds in a number of new formats, which brings the supported list to: ISO, VMDK, OVF, Amazon EC2, OpenStack and OpenVZ.

I'm pleased to announce that we have just added Xen to the list of optimized builds. They are hot out of the build farm and available for immediate download.

You can get them from the Download link on the appliance pages.

Pre-seeding / Default passwords

The Xen images are mainly built for hosting providers who utilize the Xen Hypervisor.

Because Xen builds are used in headless deployments (without an interactive console), they include an inithook which preseeds default values and passwords.

/usr/lib/inithooks/firstboot.d/29preseed

MASTERPASS=turnkey

cat>$INITHOOKS_CONF<<EOF
export ROOT_PASS=$MASTERPASS
export DB_PASS=$MASTERPASS
export APP_PASS=$MASTERPASS
export APP_EMAIL=admin@example.com
export APP_DOMAIN=DEFAULT
export HUB_APIKEY=SKIP
export SEC_UPDATES=FORCE
EOF

You will most likely want to have your provisioning system to override the defaults by creating /etc/inithooks.conf.

Note that inithooks.conf will be blanked out once its no longer needed for security. You should also make sure that inithooks.conf includes *ALL* of the variables, otherwise the inithook system will turn on interactivity.

If you cannot support preseeding, the alternative is to have the user execute turnkey-init on first login.

Muchas Gracias to Marc from GigaTux (an official TurnKey partner) for testing the Xen images and providing feedback!
 

Comments

I have Xenserver running, but minimal knowledge of where to get started. I'll learn something one way or the other today.

Jeremy Davis's picture

Xen is open source hypervisoer tech as opposed to XenServer which is a proprietry hypervisor OS (built on top of Xen technology). These are Xen images - not XenServer ones...

According to this post the Xen images are not directly compatible with XenServer (although there is mention of how they can be converted).

BTW How you going Rik? Long time - no see mate! Hope you're well. :)

Alon Swartz's picture

If you need some pointers on getting Xen up and running with TurnKey, Marc has provided steps and tips here. Thanks Marc!

Jeremy Davis's picture

But AFAIK the 'standard' VM images (either of them IIRC) can be used with KVM and require minimal tweaking. But personally I have never done it so YMMV.

I generally just use the OVZ images (on ProxmoxVE) and whenever I have wanted a KVM machine (Proxmox supports both OVZ & KVM) then I have just installed from ISO (which I imagine is a 3rd option if you get stuck...)

Endre Palatinus's picture

XenServer has become open-source. Are you planning to support it from now?

This would be really appreciated, since I could make the 12.0 VMs work on XenServer 6.1, but I simply cannot get the 12.1 VMs work on it. Unfortunatelly, the old 12.0 VMs cannot be downloaded any more...

For those who whish to install 12.0 images on XenServer 6.1/6.2, check out my tutorial.

Jeremy Davis's picture

But now it's open source then perhaps! :) I have just lodged a feature request on the TKL Dev Tracker.

Jeremy Davis's picture

Your question prompted me to a quick bit of research and I note that SolusVM also supports OpenVZ and KVM. I know that these VM technologies are irrelevant to your question directly but I figured I'd add this quickly as an FYI:

TurnKey provides OpenVZ templates which should work fine under SolusVM. I haven't had confirmation of that - but they work fine on ProxmoxVE and vanilla OVZ though so I have no reason to think that they wouldn't work under SolusVM.

TurnKey also provides a VMDK build (which is a disk image primarily designed for consumer/desktop grade virtualisation such as VMware player and VirtualBox). This build works great under KVM as is (recent versions of KVM support VMDK disk images OOTB). Again I haven't confirmed this on SolusVM itself, but works under vanilla QEMU/KVM and ProxmoxVE.

But back to your specific question:

The SolusVM Xen Docs suggest that the TKL Xen templates may work, although it states that there is a strict naming format which I doubt the current TKL Xem templates provide. FWIW TurnKey is built on Debian so renaming them to the specific required format would be a required first step (although obviously still no guarantee that they'd work). For example you would probably rename the 64 bit Xen LAMP appliance from:

turnkey-lamp-13.0-wheezy-amd64-xen.tar.bz2

to something like:

debian-7-x86_64-TKL_LAMP.tar.bz2

If SolusVM still doesn't see it, then perhaps try renaming the bz2 to gz (so long as your server supports untarring bz2 compression then it shouldn't matter that the extension does not match the compression - Linux is good like that! :)

If that still doesn't work then you could still always install from ISO.

Regardless, it'd be great to hear how you go.

L. Arnold's picture

I posted this in another thread yesterday here.  Jut wanted to report that the TKL XEN build installs (once a few things are set) quite well withiout mofification on Linode.com

Need tio request that they convert the build to a XEN build (KVM is standard).  Basically drop the XEN build on to HD2.  Expand it.  ShutDown.  Take Drive 1 out of the Config settings on Linode.  Reboot.

At least my experience first go round.  Will test again to make sure I'm not missing a huge step.

L. Arnold's picture

My experience is not clear that it has to be a XEN build now.  Have been running on KVM platform without problems.  XEN platforms have been discontinued functionally by Linode though they could, I think, implement upon request still.

Stevenvsi's picture

Hi,

Our hosting is with OVH and they use pygrub in order to load domU kernel.

I run into this error:

"Unable to find partition containing kernel" as well as "WARNING:root:Unknown directive root"

which is revealing.

The turnKey xen image for siteCRM is under Debian and the way it handles grub seems different then Centos.

Here is my cfg file used.

bootloader = "/usr/bin/pygrub"
memory = 2048
name = "suiteCRM"
vif=['mac=02:00:00:xx:xx:xx,bridge=br0']
cpus = "4-7"
vcpus = 4
disk = ['phy:/dev/vg0/suiteCRM4,xvda1,w','phy:/dev/vg0/swap1G-5,xvda2,w']
root = "/dev/xvda1"
extra = "fastboot"
 

Error generated.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/pygrub", line 866, in <module>raise RuntimeError, "Unable to find partition containing kernel" RuntimeError: Unable to find partition containing kernel
[root@sun xen]# Error: Boot loader didn't return any data!

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,

Steven

--
Steven

Jeremy Davis's picture

Although much of the info I found is quite old so I'm not sure if it's relevant. FWIW I googled:
File "/usr/bin/pygrub" in raise RuntimeError, "Unable to find partition containing kernel"

Otherwise I'm not much help to you sorry, I don't use Xen (have never used it) so can't offer any advice or even test any hunches... Good luck and please post back if you have any success.

FWIW if we have had reports that importing the VMDK build (i.e. the alternate VM build, rather than the Xen build) works for XenCenter 6.5 (free). I just read that XenCenter is from Citrix, so is related to XenServer, not vanilla Xen so that's probably not relevant to you but thought I'd add that it anyway...

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