OVH [SoYouStart] Configuration

In case you are renting an OVH, Kimsufi or SoYouStart dedicated server, it's pretty easy to get up and running with a Xen server !

With those dedicated servers, you have the opportunity to use a “ready made” installation template that will setup your server in a Citrix XenServer 6.5 (64bits) or Citrix XenServer 7.0.0 (BETA) (no SoftRAID) (64bits) configuration.

It's outside the scope of this article to explain how to install those configurations on your dedicated server, and we'll assume here that you've already managed to have a running Xen Server. In our example we'll be operating on a Citrix XenServer 6.5 (64bits) configuration…

The easiest way to jump start using your Xen Server is to use a management tool.

When it comes to Xen GUI applications, there are roughly only two choices available:

• Install XenCenter (Windows only), by typing your Xen Server IP into a Web Browser, you'll see a link to download the XenCenterSetup.exe
• Install OpenXenManager, which is a (python) multiplatform implementation of XenCenter. To install OpenXenManager on Debian or Ubuntu, you can follow this tutorial.

We'll need a base OS as a host for our XO deployment, you can delve into the details of configuring a Debian base template, or you can use this link to download a pre-configured Debian 8.9 template xva that can be immediately imported into your Xen Server (please note that this appliance needs to be configured to fit your configuration, mainly at the network level)…

We'll be using this Debian 8.9 template in the following example.

We could use the CLI to execute all the commands required, but since this tutorial is aimed at keeping things simple we'll introduce a few GUI applications that will greatly ease access and manipulation of our Xen Server.