Copying a Xen VM

Some of you have already wondered, "if Mike is just going to copy an
existing VM, isn't he going to have IP conflicts and stuff?"

This is true.

There seem to be two obvious options:

- Quickly change the IP address after the vm comes up so they don't
conflict. It's a reasonable choice, but has real potential to cause
problems if your doing it on a production system.

- Have a DHCP server on the Dom0 (host machine) that serves up IP
addresses for the VM's

The second choice is my favorite but it has it's downside as well. If
the dhcp server isn't working for some reason then the virtual machines
won't have network connectivity. At least not what you'd expect.

The other question that might be floating around in your head is, how
in the world are you going to be sure you get the same IP address each
time you boot a VM?

That's a smart question and the answer lies in use a DHCP static entry.
  This allows us to assign specific IP addresses to specific MAC
addresses. Since we control the MAC address at the Xen configuration
level, we will always know what IP address a specific machine will have.

Kinda cool, huh?

It makes me wonder if there aren't some even better choices out there.

Mike B.

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Received on Sat Nov 10 20:46:11 2007