Prepare XenServer for OpenStack

Some hints on preparing your XenServer machine to work with OpenStack.

Supplimental Packs

XenServer and the binary XCP distribution have the ability to have supplemental packs. Once these are ready, all the following steps can be performed by a set of OpenStack supplemental packs.

There are plans to build a supplemental pack that can fetch and install a pre-prepared DomU templated.

One big advantage of having these packs, is that they can be installed as part of a PXE install of XenServer.

XenAPI Plugins

OpenStack has some plugins to XenAPI. These must be installed in either:

/etc/xapi.d/plugins/ (XenServer)
/usr/lib/xcp/plugins/ (XCP on Ubuntu)

You can get the plugins from here: https://github.com/openstack/nova/tree/master/plugins/xenserver/xenapi

VIF Isolation Rules

There are some docs on this here: https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/master/plugins/xenserver/doc/networking.rst

You can get these from here: https://github.com/openstack/nova/tree/master/plugins/xenserver/networking

SSH configuration

To allow features like resize where a vhd disk is copied using ssh and rsyc, you will need to configure password-less login between all your XenServer hosts.

You can find much information on how to do this. One such source is: http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/jpmg/ssh/authorized_keys_howto.html

Required Directories

It would seem to make resize work, you need to run the following command on your XenServer hosts:

mkdir /images

XenServer/PostInstall