Home Virtualization Server

I chose to install Citrix XenServer 6 on my server.  The bad news is that Citrix doesn't offer a management console for Linux or a web console, so it's next to impossible to manage your virtual environment without a Windows machine.  I found a project called OpenXenManager that tries to fill that void.  I installed it on my Ubuntu machine by following some instructions I found (see below).

sudo apt-get install subversion python-glade2 python-gtk-vnc

svn co https://openxenmanager.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/openxenmanager openxenmanager 

cd openxenmanager/trunk 

./openxenmanager 

I first had to edit the openxenmanager file in the trunk directory and replace the occurrence of python2 with python before it would run correctly.

I'm glad I was able to find OpenXenManager because it does allow me to do a lot of management tasks directly from my Linux workstation.  However, it is not a polished product.  It will occasionally lock up or crash.  I also didn't see a way to activate my XenServer installation from the OpenXenManager interface.  Same goes for applying patches to XenServer.  But I was able to use it to install a few Windows server guests.

Ironically, it doesn't work so well for Linux guests.  At least for the Ubuntu 10.04 releases I have tried to install using it.  Actually, it will install an HVM Linux guest without any problems.  But with HVM you don't get features like live migration.  For that, the virtual machine needs to be running in paravirtualized mode (PV).  Doing this from OpenXenManager is a lot of extra work than doing it from the Windows-based XenCenter console.  And even when I did this from OpenXenManager, I still couldn't access the console of the VM.  I could, however, access the console from XenCenter.  Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the latest SVN release of OpenXenCenter is still the equivalent of XenCenter 5.something instead of the latest version 6 release.

Speaking from experience, if you have a motherboard that supports it, make sure you disable AMD's Cool & Quiet feature in your BIOS.  Before I disabled this, VM guest installation was incredibly slow.  It sped up tremendously with this feature disabled.

Other than the stuff I mentioned above, XenCenter 6 is doing a great job.  Honestly, if you running this in a Windows environment, I don't think you'll have any issues.  Most of my complaints so far are based around the fact that Citrix isn't planning to offer a Linux management console.  Even better would be a web based management interface.  Something that would work across most platforms with a browser.