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. First edit securetty

vi securetty

A line containing hvc0 should be in the file.

File: /etc/securetty

#...

# IBM iSeries/pSeries virtual console
hvc0
hvc1
#...

Then search inittab for a line with tty like the one below:

File: /etc/inittab

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

and edit it to:

File: /etc/securetty

c1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 hvc0 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