Clone Xen RHEL5 (CentOS 5.2) VM

By Michael Altfield, on June 13th, 2009

Hello world! I just updated my whole server environment and, my, things are looking good. Anyway, I had to run through these steps a half dozen times, so I thought I would post it here for myself and (maybe even) others.

Here's the commands I ran to turn a clone of my base RHEL5 (CentOS 5.2) Xen image into another working virtual machine on my RHEL5 (CentoOS 5.2) Xen Host:

# create the cloned disk image
virt-clone -o base_ceos5 -n 
   # At the prompt, enter /var/lib/xen/images/.img

# Now, using virt-manager, boot the machine and open the console
...

# Login, and change the root password!
passwd

# EDIT CONFIGURATION FILES

# setup static network connection
vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
   DEVICE=eth0
   BOOTPROTO=static
   BROADCAST=192.168.0.255
   HWADR=
   IPADDR=192.168.0.
   NETMASK=255.255.255.0
   ONBOOT=yes

# change hostname everywhere it is necessary
vi /etc/sysconfig/network
   ...
    HOSTNAME=
   ...
vi /etc/hosts
   ...
   192.168.0.     . 
   ...

# use the hostname command to reset the hostname immediately
hostname 

# reset syslog so that it collects the change
/etc/init.d/syslog restart

# RESET eth0 TO OBTAIN STATIC IP ADDRESS
/etc/init.d/network restart

# NOW, LOGIN WITH SSH, CREATE USERS && PASSWD USERS && INSTALL ANY ADDITIONAL, BASE SOFTWARE