Talk:HOWTOS

Add a Hard Drive to Citrix XenServer

Adding new hard-drive in XenServer is a bit different from the traditional Linux process. For XenServer, you need to create a container called a 'storage repository' to define a particular storage target (such as a hard disk), in which Virtual Disk Images (VDIs) of VMs are stored. A VDI is nothing but an abstracted storage space which acts as the hard-disk for VMs.

Xen storage repository supports IDE, SATA, SCSI and SAS drives when locally connected, apart from iSCSI, NFS, SAS and fiber channel in case of a remote storage.

Steps to create an SR in a XenServer.

1. SSH to the XenServer as root. 2. Find the disk ID of the new device using the following commands:

cat /proc/partitions

You will see list of all the HDDs and partitions. Find which device is your new local disk. This is probably “sdx”(most probably sdb) or “/cciss/c0d1p0”.

ll /dev/disk/by-id

This command will list the disk ids for all the partitions/HDDs present in the server as shown in the image below.

Find the disk ID of the “sdx” or “cciss/c0d1”disk. The “scsi-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx” or “cciss-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”format is what you need.

3. Find out the 'host-uuid' in the XenSserver using the following command.

xe host-list