Creating a Virtual Machine from an Existing one Manually

Back to: Xen on Debian

Assuming an LVM setup, this is the command for allocating the required disk space (in this example 20Gb) for the main disk of the virtual machine. Another amount is required for the swap space.

lvcreate -L20G -n machine-name volumegroup-name
lvcreate -L2G -n machine-name-swap volumegroup-name

where machine-name and volumegroup-name are specific to the intended configuration.

The virtual units are formatted

mkfs.ext4 /dev/volumegroup-name/machine-name
mkswap /dev/volumegroup-name/machine-name-swap

After the file copy, it is necessary to edit some configuration files: securetty, inittab and fstab

vi securetty

File: /etc/securetty

        (hvc0)
        ()

vi inittab c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 hvc0 linux

c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux

vi fstab /dev/xvda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 /dev/xvda4 swap swap defaults 0 0 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

cd /dev mknod xvc0 c 204 191 mknod hvc0 c 229 0 mknod xvda b 202 0 mknod xvda1 b 202 1