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Showing posts from February, 2014

How to update a single XenServer 6.2 host before adding it to a pool

You may find yourself in the position where you need to add a machine into a pool, a new host that is, and it's patching is well behind. Thankfully there is a relatively straightforward way to do this. You will need to have already downloaded and extracted the required files. On a computer with XenCentre installed run the following commands (assuming default install and Windows 7 / 8) Open a command prompt Win+r, then type cmd (or go to Start -> Run -> cmd and return) cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\XenCenter" From here run: xe patch-upload -s server-ip  -u root -pw secret-password  file-name=c:\ username\Downloads\XS62ESP1\XS62ESP1.xupdate  and hit return. Make sure the items in italics  is replaced with your actual details. Once this finished, you'll get a long string of characters appear and that's the patch UUID. Normally when updating a pool we make note of that, but I've found another way that works just as well. Download puTTY -

XenServer 6.2 - installed on a USB drive and installed on an SD Card

In this post I want to talk about recent experiences I've had with XenServer 6.2 on USB drives and SD cards. In a particular situation, I was forced initially down this path due to specific hardware and lack of appropriate drives. The upshot is that it was entirely unsuccessful and here is why: Firstly, it's important to be aware that XenServer isn't all that happy being installed on these devices. After you install, you must boot back up on the XenServer CD and then (using ALT-F2) drop to a command line. To get XenServer to boot on USB do the following: From the command line do this:  # cat /proc/partitions this tells you what partitions there are that XenServer can see. Typically you will see /dev/sda and it's children - /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2 etc. We want /dev/sda1 # mkdir /target create a temporary location so we can change our root directory # mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /target mount our existing /dev/sda1 partition to /target, giving us access to the