[Xen-users] [XCP] XCP NFS Root

["Nick Couchman" <Nick.Couchman@xxxxxxxxx>]

So, a few days ago I asked about network/iSCSI booting XCP (dom0).
Doesn't seem like it's something that very many people have done, since
I didn't get much response, so I decided to give it a shot myself.  I
was able to install a couple of CentOS 5 packages that help with network
booting and get the system to boot off of NFS (can provide some more
detail on that, later), but now I'm running into a little networking
Catch-22.

Booting off NFS (or iSCSI, for that matter), you have to specify an
Ethernet device as your root device, and this device is brought up
during the initrd phase of the boot sequence in order to mount the root
filesystem.  So, I've specified eth0 as my root device, and it is
brought up successfully, obtains an IP address, and mounts the root FS.
Unfortunately this all falls apart when XCP goes to bring up xenbr0,
which contains eth0, in order to share the device with VMs that might
run on this host.

Another side effect of xenbr0 not coming up successfully seems to be
that none of the XCP management stuff actually listens on eth0 - it must
be configured to listen on xenbr0, so I cannot manage the XCP host using
any external tools.

I know some version of Xen contain scripts that move the IP address from
the ethernet card to the bridge during Xen initialization - I'm
wondering if anyone knows a good way to do this on XCP?  Or some other
way to get this NFS-over-root system to behave correctly.  Obviously I
could use a dedicated interface for network booting, but this isn't
ideal - the hosts I'm looking at booting over NFS have limited network
adapters, and I'd like to be able to maximize my use of them.

Thanks,
-- 
Nick Couchman
Manager, Information Technology
SEAKR Engineering, Inc.
6221 South Racine Circle
Centennial, CO
Desk: 303-784-7724
Office: 303-790-8499
Fax: 303-662-8703
Web: http://www.seakr.com





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