Managing Jumpbox virtual machines with Redhat Enterprise

I have long run the great Jumpbox virtual machines with Redhat EL 5 and Xen, but they have always had a different start up process to other machines, as the configuration file is slightly different.

I decided it would be much neater to control all the Xen based virtual machines with virt-manager, the GUI VM management tool supplied with RH5.4

It was a lot easier to do than I thought, basically I created a fully virtualized machine, with a phoney disk image. It is important to remember that the jumpbox VM's are not paravirtualized, and use qemu for their device's.

Now all I had to do was open the file that virt-manager had created in the /etc/xen sub-directory and edit it.

I changed the MAC address of the virtual NIC to that it was intended to be, and changed the virtual disk images that it pointed too.

The full file is below , and shows all the important parts. Voila , it run's like a charm and is now just another Xen virtual image that I can manage with the standard tools.

name = "fs-wiki"
uuid = "2d10f9db-a6df-ce50-c2b0-8255d80af734"
maxmem = 512
memory = 512
vcpus = 1
builder = "hvm"
kernel = "/usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader"
boot = "c"
pae = 1
acpi = 1
apic = 1
localtime = 0
on_poweroff = "destroy"
on_reboot = "restart"
on_crash = "restart"
device_model = "/usr/lib64/xen/bin/qemu-dm"
sdl = 0
vnc = 1
vncunused = 1
keymap = "en-gb"
disk = [ "file:/var/lib/xen/images/moinmoin-1.1.9/disks/root/root.hdd,hda,w", "file:/var/lib/xen/images/moinmoin-1.1.9/disks/data/data.xen,hdb,w", ",hdc:cdrom,r" ]
vif = [ "mac=00:16:3e:16:d2:24,bridge=xenbr0,script=vif-bridge,vifname=vif12.0" ]
parallel = "none"
serial = "pty"