4 days since this article was written, Debian Squeeze was officially released (as current STABLE). And one of the things I was excited about was the full support of Xen 4. Upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze was easy as 1,2,3 but after I configured my newly “fresh installed” Squeeze Xen server I was bit surprised that there were no (based on several hours of googling?) “free” downloadable Xen images for Squeeze though I found this site that exactly offers the same images but its not free (thought it was always an OpenSource eih?). So I decided to make my own.
Cloudmin GPL is really awesome! (and of course my all-time favorite Webmin), it saves me a lot of time creating and managing Xen guest servers because I’m not really a hardcore Unix guy you know (btw I ‘m a Windows Sysadmin and .NET developer right?) that is why I stick to GUI as much as possible. Anyway here is the trick to make an instant Squeeze Xen image.
1. You must find a way to get a fresh and clean Squeeze environment to be use as your base image. There were lot of ways to do this, in my case I used my VMware Workstation 7 to setup and make Debian Squeeze (using the debian-6.0.0-xxx-netinst iso file downloaded from debian website).
2. After successfully setup a fresh OS turn it off (be sure to Power Off, do not suspend).
3. Get the VMware Virtual Disk drive file of the Squeeze you created in VMware (just find it in your computer -> or check it in your VMware settings).
4. Copy the file to your Xen/Cloudmin server (in my case the file is Debian Squeeze.vmdk).
5. You must convert the file first to xen compatible format. To do this You will need the qemu-img disk image manipulation tool. You can install using-> apt-get install qemu
6. After successfully installing the tool, run -> qemu-img convert -f vmdk vmware_image.vmdk -O raw xen_image.img
7. Then rest of it will be in the cloudmin.
8. Login to your Cloudmin using the root account (unless you made a user that has enough privileged to create new images its fine).
9. Go to Cloudmin Settings -> New System Images.
10. Click the Create Image for Xen link at the lower right part just above the Download Selected Images

11. In the details form, select whole disk as Image file format then Debian Linux in Operating System. Specify the location of the converted image file you made before in the Image Source textbox. You have the option also to put the processed image to the Cloudmin storage location after, but in my case I didn’t selected it cause it gets me trouble looking the file after. Please put the unique ID of the image you wanna create and also DO NOT USE SPACE! You can only do that on the description box below. I highly recommend to compress the file to save disk space.
12. After reviewing the settings, Click Create button below. It will start processing so be patient.
13. When it successfully finished You can now start creating your new Xen “Squeeze” guest systems. Congrats!








