Where is the XenServer 7 VM's serial console?

Francesco Provino

Hi everybody, I just facing another XS7 poor-documentation issue… or maybe I'm not to good at searching information when I'm in a hurry :D.

I just need to activate the VM serial console from the CLI via XAPI, to enter guest FDE LUKS password with copy-and-paste and not writing it manually.
With libvirt is super simple, just "virsh console".
What is the xe equivalent?

Thank you in advance!

DustinB3403

Putty allows you to copy and paste.

Any reason this won't work?

scottalanmiller

@DustinB3403 said in Where is the XenServer 7 VM's serial console?:

Putty allows you to copy and paste.

Any reason this won't work?

Presumably services are not running yet.

DustinB3403

@scottalanmiller That could be.

But he's wanting to make changes to the VM from XS's console, which while possible, should all be documented.

xe help --all should help to find what he's looking for

Francesco Provino

@scottalanmiller said in Where is the XenServer 7 VM's serial console?:

@DustinB3403 said in Where is the XenServer 7 VM's serial console?:

Putty allows you to copy and paste.

Any reason this won't work?

Presumably services are not running yet.

Yes, I'm talking about the LUKS password provided on boot. Literally nothing is running on the VM apart from the pre-boot environment :D.

Francesco Provino

@DustinB3403 said in Where is the XenServer 7 VM's serial console?:

@scottalanmiller That could be.

But he's wanting to make changes to the VM from XS's console, which while possible, should all be documented.

xe help --all should help to find what he's looking for

I've already tried with "xe console", but… maybe the serial console is not present in the standard virtual hardware?

stacksofplates

@Francesco-Provino said in Where is the XenServer 7 VM's serial console?:

@DustinB3403 said in Where is the XenServer 7 VM's serial console?:

@scottalanmiller That could be.

But he's wanting to make changes to the VM from XS's console, which while possible, should all be documented.

xe help --all should help to find what he's looking for

I've already tried with "xe console", but… maybe the serial console is not present in the standard virtual hardware?

So with KVM you need to add console=ttyS0 (for RHEL based) to the boot line in GRUB. Is that added in the guest here? I don't know if that will work with XenServer or not

Francesco Provino

@DustinB3403 said in Where is the XenServer 7 VM's serial console?:

@scottalanmiller That could be.

But he's wanting to make changes to the VM from XS's console, which while possible, should all be documented.

xe help --all should help to find what he's looking for

Of course it's added.
I've replicated the exact procedure I've done with a centOS guest in a KVM host... but xe console vm=blabla just return "No text console available". It seems that I can't find a way to add a serial tty to the guest with either cli and both the guis (XO and XC).

Francesco Provino

Found it! The command is "xl console", and it's seems like it's an unsupported feature as of today!

Francesco Provino

I just write an article about that here: http://www.francescoprovino.com/2017/04/16/full-disk-encryption-unlocking-from-virtual-serial-tty-paranoia-xenserver-and-libvirt/ .