xen

I've been working pretty extensively with Xen and Puppet in my new job, really loving it! I've been creating a whole load of Xen hosts, most of which are cloned from an initial image I built using Xen-tools. I've just finished a script which is over on my github page, which basically automates what was previously a manual process.

Basically, it copies your existing disk.img and swap.img, generates a new xen.cfg file based on some interactive input (desired hostname, IP, memory and number of vCPUs) plus a random Xen mac address, then mounts the disk.img file and changes some appropriate system files - /etc/hostname, hosts, and network/interfaces.

All quite simple and straight forward, but quite nice to have automated.

GenXen

Here's the README:

GenXen #
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A script for automating Xen VM deployment.

It requires that you have a base disk.img and swap.img already created.
I created mine with:
xen-create-image -pygrub -size=50Gb -swap=9Gb -vcpus=2 -memory 6Gb -dist=squeeze -dhcp -passwd -dir=/var/virt-machines -hostname=xen-squeeze-base

Fill in some of the variables at the top of GenXen.pl before running, then simply:
./GenXen.pl

The interactive part will ask for hostname, memory size, vCPUs, IP address, then generate a unique Xen mac address, and write these all to a xen config file which will be saved in /etc/xen/

It'll copy your disk.img and swap.img to destination dir, mount the disk.img and create appropriate files for:
/etc/hostname
/etc/hosts
/etc/network/interfaces

After that you should be good to launch with:

xm create -c /etc/xen/whatever-your-hostname-is.cfg