XenServer drivers

Overview

XenServer drivers can be used to deploy hosts with Ironic by using XenServer VMs to simulate bare metal nodes.

Ironic provides support via the pxe_ssh and agent_ssh drivers for using a XenServer VM as a bare metal target and do provisioning on it. It works by connecting via SSH into the XenServer host and running commands using the ‘xe’ command.

This is particularly useful for deploying overclouds that use XenServer for VM hosting as the Compute node must be run as a virtual machine on the XenServer host it will be controlling. In this case, one VM per hypervisor needs to be installed.

This support has been tested with XenServer 6.5.

Usage

• Install the VMs using the “Other Install Media” template, which will ensure that they are HVM guests
• Set the HVM guests to boot from network first
• If your generated initramfs does not have the fix for bug 1498576, disable the Xen PV drivers as a work around

xe vm-param-set uuid=<uuid> xenstore-data:vm-data="vm_data/disable_pf: 1"