Autostart Xenserver VMs

When using the free edition of XenServer 6.0, you’ll want to do a few things such as enabling Auto Start / Auto Boot / Auto Power On.  For some reason this feature was removed from the “Free” version in 6.0, so lets go ahead and set this up.

First your going to want to get the UUID of the VM’s you wish to enable auto start on as well as the UUID of the pool these VM’s reside in.

To get the list of the pool’s on your XenServer type:

xe pool-list

Copy the UUID of the pool, in my case there ist just one pool. Then issue the following command, and replace the UUID with your pools UUID.

xe pool-param-set uuid=UUID other-config:auto_poweron=true

Then, at the command prompt of your XenServer type:

xe vm-list

You should get a full list of the VM’s on the server, along with their name and UUID. Copy the UUID of the VM you wish to enable autostart then issue the command below, again replacing the UUID with the UUID of the VM you wish to auto start.

To Auto Start your Pool (replace UUID with the UUID of your Pool):

xe pool-param-set uuid=UUID other-config:auto_poweron=true

To Auto Start your VM (replace the UUID with the UUID of your VM):

xe vm-param-set uuid=UUID other-config:auto_poweron=true

xe vm-param-set uuid=UUID other-config:auto_poweron=true

And thats it, the next time you ever need to power cycle your main server, the Xen instances should power up automatically.

VirtualBox in full screen on second monitor

I've been having real problems with this, and it turns out that the solution is really simple!

When you try to run a guest OS full screen, goes to the first monitor, so the menu bars etc. for Ubuntu are hidden.  To make it full screen on the second monitor:

1. Enter full screen with the guest OS
2. Hover over the VirtualBox hidden menu at the bottom of the guest OS
3. Click View | Virtual Screen 1 | Use Host Screen 2

This will make the guest OS show up in the second monitor when using full screen mode.  Works with Ubuntu 10.04 host and Windows 7 guest.