XenServer 8 Packer Template for MAAS

Introduction

The Packer template in this directory creates a XenServer 8 AMD64 image for use with MAAS.

This template is also compatible with XCP-ng which is the Open Source equivalent.

Prerequisites (to create the image)

• A machine running Ubuntu 22.04+ with the ability to run KVM virtual machines.
• qemu-utils, libnbd-bin, nbdkit and fuse2fs
• Packer, v1.11.0 or newer
• The XenServer 8 ISO

Requirements (to deploy the image)

• MAAS 3.3+
• Curtin 22.1+

Customizing the Image

The deployment image may be customized by modifying the http/xenserver8.xml.pkrtpl.hcl answer file. See the XenServer Answer file reference for more information.

For XCP-ng, see the Answer file page.

Building an image

You can easily build the image using the Makefile:

make ISO=/PATH/TO/XenServer8_2024-12-09.iso

Alternatively you can manually run packer. Your current working directory must be in packer-maas/xenserver8, where this file is located. Once in packer-maas/xenserver8 you can generate an image with:

packer init
PACKER_LOG=1 packer build -var 'xenserver8_iso_path=/PATH/TO/XenServer8_2024-12-09.iso'.

The installation process non-interactive. Note this image only supports UEFI boot mode.

Network Device Name Compatibility Note

Both XenServer and XCP-ng ship with a custom Linux kernel 4.19 which uses the traditional NIC naming schema. This requires commissioning and deployment using the following kernel paramaters on target machines on MAAS:

net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0

For additional hardware support details, refer to the HCL Page.

Makefile Parameters

HEADLESS

Defaults to true. Set to false in order to see the VM during the build process.

ISO

The path to the installation ISO image for XenSever or XCP-ng.

TIMEOUT

The timeout to apply when building the image. The default value is set to 1h.

Uploading an image to MAAS

maas $PROFILE boot-resources create \
    name='custom/xenserver8' title='XenServer 8' \
    architecture='amd64/generic' filetype='ddgz' \
    base_image='rhel/8' content@=xenserver8-lvm.dd.gz

Default Username

The default username is centos.