I just started playing with XenServer/XenCenter 6.5 and found a couple of templates required ISO images. Specifically Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr due to a bug, you can google it. Other Images like Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin didn’t require an ISO and just needed a URL to install. Funny enough this failed for me, I was going to install 12.04 and then upgrade to 14.04 but that failed.
Google hasn’t really been all that helpful at first, it took me a while to find a solution. There are a lot of old articles that reference LVM which I believe was used up until XenServer 6.2?
I installed XenServer 6.5 from the ISO installer, this creates two 4GB GPT partitions and leaves the rest of the space on your installation destination as free. For more details the following blog post has some more information about the installation partitions and how to keep them clean.
http://xenserver.org/discuss-virtualization/virtualization-blog/entry/xenserver-root-disk-maintenance.html
So I would need to create an additional GPT partition to store my ISO’s on. I used a 128GB SSD for XenServer, I used gdisk and created a 50GB partition.
gdisk /dev/sda
I made sure to leave the type as 0700 and then wrote the changes to disk. If you don’t know how to use gdisk, google can help.
I then had to reboot to see the new partition, and then formatted it as ext3.
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda3
Remember /dev/sda2 is the random 4GB not mounted partition, so don’t format it!
I then mounted the partition to /mnt/iso and told XenServer about it.
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/iso xe sr-create name-label ="ISO Repository" type=iso device-config:location=/mnt/iso device-config:legacy_mode=true content-type=iso
It showed as blank within XenCenter and I don’t know why, I just renamed it. This is actually due to a space after “name-label” as per Sean in the comments. Here is the correct line!
xe sr-create name-label=”ISO Repository” type=iso device-config:location=/mnt/iso device-config:legacy_mode=true content-type=is
I also noticed it unmounted the partition, so I had to remount it. I then uploaded my ISO images using WinSCP, I then went to go create my new VM! But my newly uploaded ISO’s didn’t show up. I had to refresh the ISO storage so it could see the newly uploaded files. Just click on the new “ISO” SR and click the “Storage” tab and press “Rescan” which then showed the ISO’s correctly.
Bammmm. Done, any mistakes or incorrectness, please let me know.