Xen Configuration Reference
The following section discusses some commonly changed options in XenServer.
The table below provides a complete reference of all
configuration options available for configuring Xen with
OpenStack.
The recommended way to use Xen with OpenStack is through the
XenAPI driver. To enable the XenAPI driver, add the following
configuration options /etc/nova/nova.conf
and restart the nova-compute service:
compute_driver=xenapi.XenAPIDriver
xenapi_connection_url=http://your_xenapi_management_ip_address
xenapi_connection_username=root
xenapi_connection_password=your_password
These connection details are used by the OpenStack Compute
service to contact your hypervisor and are the same details
you use to connect XenCenter, the XenServer management
console, to your XenServer or XCP box.
The xenapi_connection_url is generally the management
network IP address of the XenServer. Though it is possible to use the
internal network IP Address (169.250.0.1) to contact XenAPI, this does not
allow live migration between hosts, and other functionalities like host aggregates
do not work.
It is possible to manage Xen using libvirt, though this is not
well-tested or supported.
To experiment using Xen through libvirt add the following
configuration options
/etc/nova/nova.conf:
compute_driver=libvirt.LibvirtDriver
libvirt_type=xen
Agent
If you don't have the guest agent on your VMs, it takes a long time for nova to decide the VM has successfully started.
Generally a large timeout is required for Windows instances, bug you may want to tweak agent_version_timeout
Firewall
If using nova-network, IPTables is supported:
firewall_driver=nova.virt.firewall.IptablesFirewallDriver
Alternately, doing the isolation in Dom0:
firewall_driver=nova.virt.xenapi.firewall.Dom0IptablesFirewallDriver
VNC Proxy Address
Assuming you are talking to XenAPI through the host local management network,
and XenServer is on the address: 169.254.0.1, you can use the following:
vncserver_proxyclient_address=169.254.0.1
Storage
You can specify which Storage Repository to use with nova by looking at the
following flag. The default is to use the local-storage setup by the default installer:
sr_matching_filter="other-config:i18n-key=local-storage"
Another good alternative is to use the "default" storage (for example
if you have attached NFS or any other shared storage):
sr_matching_filter="default-sr:true"
To use a XenServer pool, you must create the pool
by using the Host Aggregates feature.
Configuration Reference Table for Xen