[Xen-users] [XCP] Clone XCP installation, force UUID de-duplication

[Alexandre Kouznetsov <alk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello.

I am installing a number of XCP instances on several hosts, that have 
identical hardware configuration and intended usage. May call them host 
nodes within a cluster. This is about massive deploy of XCP on physical 
hosts.
To give more details, the nodes ideally should be diskless, but I am 
trying to board one thing at time, so right now they boot from a 
PXE/TFTP server and mount rootfs from a USB flash drive. The need for 
network boot is because my nodes have buggy BIOS and can't pick up the 
boot loader directly from USB. I may describe deeper this setup's 
issues, if relevant.
The initial installation of XCP node was made on a VirtualBox instance, 
then cloned to USB flash at filesystem level (tarball, then extract it 
to the flash drive, equivalent to a "cp -a"). The XCP instance boots 
fine, seems to be quite consistent and ready to work.
The problem I face is the UUID de-duplication, when making more clones 
of this installation. It seems XCP assigns a unique UUID to everything. 
When I simply clone the installation, different hosts will get 
duplicated UUIDs for filesystems, swap, host-uuid, etc. That scares the 
control panel I'm trying to use (CloudStack, in this moment), and 
generally breake the whole concept of UUID.
I already messed with udev rules (at least MAC address has changed) and 
"xe pif-forget"/"xe pif-introduce" to make peace between XCP an the new 
network card, shortly after moving the installation from a VirtualBox 
instance to a USB flash drive on a physical host at the first time. I 
can share the procedure, if relevant. But it seems that there are much 
more UUIDs around that must be de-duplicated. I am wondering, if there 
is a way to force the system to re-regenrate them on each copy I make of 
the XCP FS, in the same way it does while installing it form CD.
The "dump" solution would be to install XCP from CD on each host, which 
I'm trying to avoid. I would like to be able to untar my master setup, 
chroot to it (or boot it on the host for the first time), manually run 
some commands (or a previously written script), and have a unique 
installation of XCP on a given host system. Once i archive this goal 
manually, it might be automated.
My tests involves XCP 1.1 and 1.5. The problem is the same with both of 
them. Finally, I can use whichever of them, 1.5 would be preferable.
My goal in this step is to re-generate every one for the UUID's used by 
a XCP installation, without too much pain.
--
Alexandre Kouznetsov

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