To ensure terminology is fully understood, XOA stands for Xen-Orchestra Appliance. It is the commercial side of Xen-Orchestra, which to add to confusion, also offers a free version of XOA with a slightly limited feature set.
So when we say “Install XO from Sources” what this actually means is that we’re installing the open source Xen-Orchestra, not the commercial XOA aka. Xen-Orchestra Appliance.
One important point that many people don’t realise is that Xen-Orchestra can actually manage the physical host server where it is installed within a virtual machine on that server. Pretty cool, right.
Step 1 – Create a Virtual Machine Running Debian 11 Bullseye
Firstly, give this virtual machine as much vCPUs and RAM that you can spare on the initial setup as this is a fairly resource intensive task getting this setup. Thankfully there is a handy XenOrchestraInstallerUpdater piece of software on GitHub from Roni Väyrynen and other contributors.
I’ve chosen the above as at the time of writing Debian 11 Bullseye is the latest supported Debian version that the above script supports.
Step 2 – Understand Sudo Permissions Have Changed in Debian 10 + 11
Yup. Your usual ‘sudo –s’ command and SSH’ing in as a root user simply no longer work on Debian 10 + 11. A rather annoying undocumented piece of information given the significance of this change. But hey, that’s why I’m writing about it here.
By default on Debian 10 and Debian 11, the root user is not included in the sudoers list, so you can’t SSH in using the user ‘root’. And on top of that, if you try to SSH into your Debian 10 or 11 virtual machine as ‘{YourUsername}’ that you configured on setup, you’ll notice that if you run the common command ‘sudo –s’ to switch to the root user, you get an error saying that your username isn’t in the sudoers list.
Say what?
Anyhow, the new command seems to be “su –“ which behaves in the same way and gets you to where you need to be.
Step 3 – Install Git
We’re going to be pulling in and running the code from the GitHub repository mentioned earlier, so to do this we need to ensure Git is install on the virtual machine so that it’s possible to download the code we need for XenOrchestraInstallerUpdater.
Simply run the command;
apt-get install git
Step 4 – Clone XenOrchestraInstallerUpdater Git Repository
Next step is to get the code from GitHub down onto your virtual machine. So simply run the command;
git clone https://github.com/ronivay/XenOrchestraInstallerUpdater.git
This will download the code to the directory you are currently in. Make a note of this and make sure you’ve put this in a sensible place that you’re going to be able to find later on.
(Optional) Create a Self-Signed SSL Certificate
The reason why this step is optional is that for playing around you don’t really need to bother with this. But obviously for production environments you want to keep security at the forefront of your mind. To be clear, this isn’t a recommendation for how to use HTTPS in a production environment, this is simply a quick way of getting SSL up and running should you choose to experiment with this;
cd /etc/ssl
mkdir xo
cd xo
openssl req –newkey rsa:4096 –x509 –sha256 –days 3650 –nodes –out xo.crt –keyout xo.key
Step 5 – Create a Copy of Configuration Files
Thankfully Xen-Orchestra comes with some handy configuration files so you don’t need to start from scratch. To copy these and make them your own simply run the following command;
cp sample.xo-install.cfg xo-install.cfg
This is the copy command, aka ‘cp’. This is saying copy the file ‘sample.xo-install.cfg’ and then paste the file with a new filename to ‘xo-install.cfg’. The joys of Linux commands.
(Optional) Configure your Xen-Orchestra Configuration File
To do this, simply run the command;
nano xo-install.cfg
Now, you only need to do this if you’ve implemented the optional step above to create an SSL certificate. If you have done this, you need to specify the location of those certificate files within your Xen-Orchestra configuration file. As an example following on from the above, this is how your configuration file would look;
# Location of pem certificate/key files. Installation will automatically configure HTTPS if these are defined. Remember to change PORT variable as well.
PATH_TO_HTTPS_CERT=/etc/ssl/xo/xo.crt
PATH_TO_HTTPS_KEY=/etc/ssl/xo/xo.key
Save the file and exit.
Step 6 – Install Xen-Orchestra (XO) from Sources
Simply run the following command and watch as things progress;
./xo-install.sh
Wait a while, watch things progress and then you’re good to go.
Step 7 – Confirm Setup Works
You’ll know that the setup works for two reasons. Firstly, the console will have lots of success messages and will tell you that everything has completed successfully. Secondly, you’ll now be able to access the IP address of the virtual machine in your web browser to login to Xen-Orchestra, the completely free and unlimited feature access to the platform so you can play around to your hearts content. Job done.
The default username and password for XO Xen-Orchestra is;
Username: admin@admin.net
Password: password
Naturally I don’t need to remind you that this is extremely insecure, so make sure to change this once you’ve got this setup.
Summary
So that’s how to get XO aka. Xen-Orchestra set up on a virtual machine inside a physical XCP-ng Server so that you can have a play around. You’ll notice that this is slightly different than how to get XOA setup via the Quick Deploy feature once you’ve got XCP-ng Server setup, but that’s a fairly straight forward click and configuration setup, but with limited features at the end of it.
The above shows you how to get the basics set up in no time with relative ease and one core dependency on the script from GitHub. The contents of this blog post have been pulled together from various snippets of insight around the internet to provide a clear guide for how to do this, with a couple of key mentions being LTS and Vates and Roni Väyrynen for both help with online video content and conversations to help identify the nuggets of information joining the dots together with the information for how to get the above setup with ease, at least the missing nuggets of information in my brain – it may be straight forward to others!
Michael Cropper
Thank-you so much for this tutorial Michael! It was not rocket science but as someone just starting it can be overwhelming. Thank you for this great guide.