XCP (Xen) on a Mac Mini

I picked up a new Mac Mini this Friday to play around with Xen at home. Right now I run a few services off of one server in my apartment, but I’d prefer to have separate VMs for each service, because I find that more manageable.

The platform I’m using is XCP (Xen Cloud Platform; an open-source alternative to Citrix XenServer). It requires the whole drive, so dual-booting isn’t an option (see note below: Dual Booting), which gave me problems. I could install it just fine (hold down ‘c’ while booting to boot from CD), but on reboot I would just get a flashing file folder icon with a question mark in the middle. I finally found the solution on the Ubuntu docs site. After installation is complete, reboot the computer and hold alt/option to get into the recovery partition (it takes a while to download the tool, presumably because they were on the partition that XCP blew away). When you get to the screen showing different options (restore from Time Machine, reinstall OSX, etc), go to Utilities > Terminal (at the top of the screen). Once in a terminal type: bless --device /dev/disk0s1 --setBoot --legacy . Then reboot (sudo shutdown -r now if you’re still in Terminal), and you should be in XCP.

legacy According to the online help (in the recovery Terminal, type ‘bless’ without any arguments), “–legacy” isn’t actually a valid argument. I assume that this is correct, and that the Ubuntu docs are wrong/outdated. Still, I included it and Terminal didn’t complain. It probably isn’t necessary, but I didn’t test the command without it. If you try it, let me know and I’ll update the post.

Dual Booting Instead of overwriting the whole disk (and needing to ‘bless’ it), you could try dual-booting OSX and debian/ubuntu, then installing XCP within that linux environment. According to the docs, this is “*very much* a work-in-progress” (emphasis theirs), so I wanted to avoid it. That said, I bought this computer soley for Xen, so I wasn’t interested in dual-booting. If you don’t want to lose your OSX installation, this may be an option to explore.