User Manual

Storix System Back up Administrat or 5 Citrix XenServ er Recover y Guide

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System Recovery of Citrix XenServer virtualized guests(domU)

The steps to perform s ystem recover y of a Citrix XenServ er virtual machi ne (domU) usi ng SBAdmin are v ery

similar to t he ste ps for an y other Linux s ystem. Ref er to th e SBAdmin Linux System Recovery Guide for

additional details. However, the fol lowing co nsiderat ions deserve m ent ion bec ause the y are sp ecific to Citrix

XenServer:

Determining virtualization type

Citrix XenServ er is capable of do ing both HVM and PV virtu alization. HVM (h ardware virt ual machin e)

technology is similar to a system running on real hardware. PV (paravirtualization) technology is a type of

virtualization specific to Xen. This type of virtualization requires the guest kernel to be modified to run in the

virtual machine.

The type of vir tualizatio n used is s et at the tim e the virtual machine is created (please refer to Citrix

documentat ion f or furt her inform ation on creatin g new vi rtual mac hines). T he pr ofile used t o create t he

virtual machine will determine which type of virtualization is used. This is not immediately clear when using

the XenServ er gra phical int erface.

The type of v irtual ization t echno lgy us ed by th e domU, c an be d etermined by logg ing into t he Xe nServer

and running the following command.

#xe vm-list params=HVM -boot-policy ,uuid,name-lab el

You will see output similar to the following:

uuid ( RO) : 8f7f2b5c- 57d1-ff53- c4b5-d9b0a71 6cdd4

name-label ( RW) : Red Hat Ent erprise Linux 5

HVM-boot-pol icy ( RW ):

uuid ( RO) : 732588a6- f7e7-11f0- 484a-d7c4100 b19da

name-label ( RW) : Custom Lin ux

HVM-boot-pol icy ( RW ) : BIOS order

The output indic ates that t he virt ual mac hine na med “Cus tom Lin ux” is us ing HV M becaus e the HV M-boot-

policy is set to “BIOS order”. The mac hine named “Red hat Enter prise Linux 5” is usi ng PV.

When restorin g a backup to a ne w virtual machine (d omU), the ne wly created v irtual machi ne must use the

same type of virtualization as the system that was backed up.

Booting a paravirtualized domU

When booting a paravirtualized domU there are two boot loader options pygrub and eliloader. Pygrub is

used to boot from a harddisk device and eliloader is used to boot from a cdrom. When recovering a domU

that had bee n prev iousl y install ed it ma y be nec essar y to cha nge this option b efore bo oting t he SBA dmin

boot media.

To determine which boot loader is in use, the following command may be run on the XenServer. Replacing

the uuid for t he domU t o be b ooted.

#xe vm-list params=PV -bootloade r uuid=94012487 -6bfa-306 d-6e9238768 2eb9b0f