As my regular readers may remember, Nixu Software entered into a technology partnership with XenSource in early 2007 before the company was acquired by Citrix in August 2007. Over the last 18 months, our product team has been working quite actively with XenServer, doing beta testing and making sure that different Nixu Products can be run seamlessly as paravirtualized virtual machines on Citrix’s XenServer platform.

As many of you know, Citrix has put a massive development effort into the latest XenServer 5, to create an enterprise / carrier grade virtualization platform offering the level of performance and availability required in business critical production environments. Having visited the Citrix Summit in Orlando this October and seen XenServer 5.0 in action, I couldn’t help but to be immensely impressed with what they had done. All the right qualities and features were there: performance, availability and user-friendly management utilities all in a competitively priced, affordable package.

As I have said here before, Nixu Software’s strategy is based on the assumption that to show return on virtualization investment, organizations must virtualize as many (network) services and applications as possible. To put this into a context, I think iPod serves as a great analogy: while iPod is certainly a great MP3 player, it would be of very little value to its owners if they didn’t have any music files in the player. In much the same way, no matter how great a virtualization platform you were running, it would be of very little value if you did not run any services or applications in it.

Of course, another thing that made iPod a huge hit for Apple was the fact that they were smart enough to launch iTunes along with iPod. Had it been difficult to download MP3 files to iPods, it would have been only the hardcore Apple fanatics and early-adopters who could have been bothered to do it. But with an online service such as iTunes, quality content was readily available to anyone and could easily be exported to, and run in, iPod.

Following this same analogy, we decided to certify Nixu Products as Citrix Ready. The idea here is to make it as easy and cost-efficient as possible for end-users running Citrix XenServer to migrate their existing DNS, DHCP and IPAM to virtual machine environment. To verify the viability of this proposition, Citrix agreed to test Nixu Products in-house to make sure that our products really are as good as we claim. And they were.

To find out Citrix’s exact position on Nixu Products, please click here to read Craig Ellrod’s excellent blog entry at Citrix Community on his impressions on the goods we deliver. Should this make you interested in giving them a go yourself, all you have to do is to register an evaluation at our website, download an ISO installation media, and boot up a new virtual machine in your XenServer. There are a few simple steps you will have to take to switch the resulting vm to paravirtualized mode – please find the instructions below.

Paravirtualizing Nixu Products in Citrix XenServer

1. Obtain Nixu SNS, Nixu DHCP Server, or Nixu NameSurfer Suite ISO image installation media and license key from www.nixusoftware.com.

2. Burn the ISO image on CD (or use virtual CD-drive)

3. Install Citrix XenEnterprise 4.1.0 or newer

4. Create a new VM using “Other Install Media” option; at the minimum, allocate 256MBs of RAM, 6-8GBs of disk space, and 1 CPU.

5. Create the VM and boot it from the ISO image. For basic installation, select “single” in the hard drive setup.

6. Log in and configure ip address, netmask and gateway for the Nixu Product. When installing Nixu NameSurfer Suite, execute installation script after this; please note that Nixu SNS and Nixu DHCP Server will execute installation script automatically.

7. Install XenTools and the accompanying kernel:

# cd /media

# mount cdrom

# cd cdrom/Linux

# ./install.sh

Kernel for Nixu products running CentOS 4 platform is:

vmlinuz-2.6.9-67.0.4.EL.xs4.1.0.19xenU

8. Shut down the VM.

9. Change the VM to PV guest as follows (the instructions have been extracted from:

http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/anilma/2008/07/02/Installing+Ubuntu+on+XenServer)

From the control domain console of your XenServer:

9a) Determine the UUID of the Nixu Product VM (e.g. Nixu SNS) by using the xe CLI:

# xe vm-list | more

<click-drag to highlight. Right click to copy, paste uuid.>

If you are logged into the control domain, pressing the <tab> key will perform auto-completion of UUIDs in subsequent XE commands, so you don’t need to keep typing it in every time!

9b) Clear the HVM Boot mode from the VM:

# xe vm-param-set uuid=<uuid> HVM-boot-policy=

9c) Switch the VM to using to the pygrub bootloader which starts the guest in PV mode by examining its filesystem for kernel:

# xe vm-param-set uuid=<uuid> PV-bootloader=pygrub

9d) configure the kernel boot arguments to display the login console on the correct TTY, so that it shows up in the XenCenter console:

# xe vm-param-set uuid=<uuid> PV-args=”console=tty0 xencons=tty”

9e) Next, you need to flag the root disk of the VM as bootable so that pygrub knows where to look for the PV kernel:

# xe vm-disk-list uuid=<uuid>

9f) Look for the UUID of the VBD for the disk. VBD stands for “Virtual Block Device” and represents how to map the virtual disk into the virtual machine:

# xe vbd-param-set uuid=<vbd uuid> bootable=true

This will set the root disk VBD to be bootable.

9g) Start the VM and check that Virtualization in General tab is “Optimized” and everything works:

# xe vm-start uuid=<vm uuid>