I’ve always had an issue with Debian Lenny and connecting via ssh or local console (xm console --role udev to the end of your xen-create-image command, and then add extra = ‘xencons=tty1 console=tty1′ to the newly created cfg file in /etc/xen.
# xen-create-image --size 10G --ip 1.2.3.4 --netmask 255.255.255.0 --gateway 1.2.3.1 --hostname newvm --lvm vg --role udev
# echo "extra = 'xencons=tty1 console=tty1'" >> /etc/xen/newvm.cfg
More info can be found at http://wiki.debian.org/Xen under “Additional note for domU on lenny using xen-tools”. Note: I do not follow their guide exactly – this is just what has worked for me.
Installing vmware tools on your vmware guests is a good idea, gives the ability to shut them from the vmware client, you get better disk/network performance, etc.
Install the packages required for the modules build as root:
# aptitude install autoconf automake binutils cpp gcc linux-headers-$(uname -r) make psmisc
In the vSphere client, right click on the guest VM. Go to ‘Guest -> Install/Upgrade VMware Tools’
This will insert a virtual cd to /dev/cdrom, which you then mount:
# mount /dev/cdrom /mnt
Copy the files to /root, umount the virtual CD and extract:
# cp /mnt/VMwareTools-4.0.0-208167.tar.gz /root # umount /mnt # cd /root # tar xvf VMwareTools-4.0.0-208167.tar.gz
Enter the vmware-tools-distrib folder and run the installer script:
# cd vmware-tools-distrib/ # ./vmware-install.pl
The default values are adequate for most cases. For the first question I like to use /usr/local/bin for the binary path, to separate vmware and system binaries. It will automatically set the prefixes for the other paths it uses to /usr/local.
