ERA 6.4 VA on XenServer 6.5 & 7

[qstsupport 0]

Hi All,

 

We have ERA 6.3 VA deployed on XenServer 6.5 no problems, however we are looking at migrating to the new ERA 6.4 VA, we were going to do a new ERA 6.4 deployment to get the new CentOS and then migrate the clients.

 

However we are having problems with ERA 6.4 not booting on XenServer, The line of interest in the journalctl logs are

 

era.local dracut-initqueue[312]: Warning: /dev/centos_ba-eraappl-v/root does not exist

era.local dracut-initqueue[312]: Warning: /dev/centos_ba-eraappl-v/swap does not exist

era.local dracut-initqueue[312]: Warning: /dev/mapper/centos_ba--eraappl--v-root does not exist

 

Has anyone got 6.4 running on XenServer?

 

Thanks Jason

[qstsupport 0]

Hi All

 

We have ERA VA 6.3 running on XenServer 6.5 without any problems. I want to update the ERA VA to 6.4 to take advantage of the new CentOS. I was going to build VA 6.4 as a fresh install and then migrate the clients over.

 

However when booting ERA 6.4 on both XenServer 6.5 and 7, I'm getting boot errors:

 

dracut-initqueue [312]: Warning: /dev/centos_ba-eraappl-v/root doesn't exist

dracut-initqueue [312]: Warning: /dev/centos_ba-eraappl-v/swap doesn't exist

dracut-initqueue [312]: Warning: /dev/mapper/centos_ba--eraappl--v-root doesn't exist

 

Any ideas how to fix this?

 

Thanks Jason

[karlisi 26]

The same here. I tried both, ova and vhd, no success.

[qstsupport 0]

Sorry about the double post, didn't think the first one went through :-)

 

I have also booted the ERA 6.4 into VMware Workstation and exported out as an ovf and tried re importing it and no luck either, having the same problem.

[MartinK 376]

Thanks for reporting. Problem seems to be in missing kernel drivers for Citrix XenServer virtual hardware -> it was removed from default kernel and has to be explicitly added. This will be also reported as ERA bug and handled appropriately.

 

Technically it requires to add drivers to /etc/dracut.conf, i.e. modify add_drivers statement to be like this:

add_drivers+="hv_vmbus hv_netvsc hv_storvsc xen-blkfront xen-netfront xen-kbdfront"

and run:

dracut -v -f

to prepare kernel.

 

Once this is done, OVA should boot also on XenServer virtual hardware.

As you already noticed, problem is how to edit&run command when machine is not booting ... this will most probably require booting another linux from DVD (some kind of live distribution) and modify it using chroot, which requires more than basic skills. We will also try to find better solution (for example enable drivers directly from kernel ocmmand line which can be edited in boot loader) but it may take some time.

[qstsupport 0]

Hi MartinK

 

Great thank you for that, it worked a charm. I just booted the ERA VA into VMWARE workstation, opened up the dracut.conf added the 3 additional drivers and exited out. Then prepared the kernal and exported it back to OVF and re-imported into Xen and boots no problems.

 

Thank you

 

Kind Regards.

Jason