Installing Xenserver

For this part, both for ease of taking screenshots and avoiding having to re-install the existing Xen install, i will be retracing my steps using a virtual machine on my desktop set roughly with the same hardware specs as the server machine.

First step is easy, burn the install ISO image to a DVD (or using a USB drive via something like Universal USB Installer worked for me) And start the install process.

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Hit enter and wait, it may take a few minutes. Click through the usual Language,  EULA screens and so on.

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This could differ depending on your setup, but as i only have a single drive to deal with here i can just click through the defaults easily.

First real option, i'd advise a complex password here just in case.

Networking, this is where i'd advise setting things manually.
My Router is set to 192.168.1.1. I've set it's DHCP server settings via the web UI to use addresses 192.168.1.20 and above, giving me a free block of 18 static IP addresses from 192.168.1.2 to 192.168.1.19 to use for manual assignments. The Xen server hardware i've set to x.15, this example virtualised one is going on x.16 and my NAS unit uses x.10

More networking. Assign the server name here.
As my ISP's DNS service can be dodgy, i set Google's DNS as primary and the router's DNS as secondary. But if you don't have issues you might want to swap these.

A few more screens you can either skip past or use the suggested settings for and away you go, installing...

.After a reboot, we're there. Bar major issues, this should be the last time you'll need to log into the machine locally. Feel free to unplug everything bar the power cable and the network cable from the machine.

Next up, Installing the XenCenter management app on another PC to configure and control this new server.

Main hardware

This is the hardware i'm working with here.
As the blog title suggests, it's pretty much built out of spare parts i had lying around.

Before it got rebuilt for Xen, it had half the RAM and two 1TB Spinpoint F3 Hard drives. It was the failure of one of those hard drives that prompted this rebuild.

Currently the hardware is as follows:

AMD Phenom II X2 555 @4.08Ghz
8GB of Corsair DDR3 RAM (4x2GB)
AMD Radeon 6540 1GB GPU
OCZ Solid3 120GB SSD
Titan Fenrir CPU Cooler
Generic 600W PSU

The hardware is a little quirky in some regards.
-The CPU overclocked well at stock voltages, but sadly i was not one of the lucky people that could unlock some of the two disabled CPU cores present on this model.
-I had to remove the top parts of the RAM heatsinks from the inner two slots to enable them to fit under the CPU heatsink.
-The SSD is a somewhat flaky model that i managed to rescue from the dead with a firmware reflash, so i'm not trusting it for reliability. I may do a follow-up post on this later.
-There is an optical drive plugged in for no real reason, i only remembered it was there when taking the pictures. Might remove this later.

And for the other main part of the equation, my trusty old NAS unit which i'll be using as NFS storage for the server.

Thecus N0503 ComboNAS

This NAS contains:
Atom N270 CPU @1.6Ghz
2GB DDR2 RAM (upgraded from 1GB)
3x 3TB Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green WD30EZRX in RAID5 giving 5585MB of usable space

Blog overview

This website is mainly focussed around the random tech things i get up to at home.
To start with, i will be going through my conversion of two different server PCs into one virtualised unit via Citrix Xencenter. This was done partly due to my main server suffering a hard drive failure and needing a rebuild anyway and partly to consolidate things down into one more flexible system.

It'll be a little out of order, since i've already done most of the setup then decided to write a website about it afterwards, but i'll make a post about it when i've caught up.