Xen Ubuntu 18 Guest Creation Using xen-create-image (bionic template and netplan fix included)

Last Updated on June 11, 2020 EDT by Jordan

So I was having issues with deploying Ubuntu 18 guests on a Xen hypervisor. It originally started with a template for bionic not existing.

This is easily fixed with a couple of commands to copy the karmic.d template to bionic.d template.

However, once your host boots up. You’re now faced with a network issue as Ubuntu 18 added netplan as the default network manager.

This is fixed by replacing the /usr/share/xen-tools/40-setup-networking file with a new xen-tools 4.8 release.

Here is the github comment.

For anyone running into this issue, @ arno481's script solves it but you have to set up the builder manually:

Cribbing from the other comments here:

Copy the ubuntu template dir into a new directory named bionic.d
cd /usr/share/xen-tools
cp -r karmic.d bionic.d
add an entry to /etc/xen-tools/distributions.conf as
bionic       = ubuntu     pygrub
Replace contents of the /usr/share/xen-tools/40-setup-networking with the contents of the 40-setup-networking-deb-netplan.txt file arno481 provided (or remove it and add the new file, making sure the permissions don't change).

create Ubuntu 18.04 image with --dist=bionic.

Done! Networking should work out-of-the-box now.

You can simply do the above to fix your issue, or install the latest 4.8 xen-tools at https://github.com/xen-tools/xen-tools/releases

Or you could just grab the 4.8 ubuntu package from eoan Ubuntu 19.10 at http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/x/xen-tools/xen-tools_4.8-1_all.deb

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