Kaviza and USB Disaster Recovery Stick

From the Truth-with-Humor Department: the reason we have this DR stick to rebuild our environment is because when I ordered our VDI servers I forgot to add DVD drives... I'm just so used to them being included by default that I never even questioned it until they showed up and I went "Huh?". Oops. Being a bit of a propeller-head, I decided to build my own solution for USB booting to the XenServer install, rather than go back and order the DVD drives. Seeing how it was useful, I decided to expand on it, and here we are with a VDI-In-A-Box-On-a-Stick solution. Where's Jose Jalapeno when you need him?

My entire Kaviza environment now lives on a 16GB USB stick. This is not to say that my App-V environment lives on the same, but a raw desktop image, kMGR appliance, and XenServer installation all now live on a bootable USB stick that I can plug in and get going in next-to-no-time. This is huge, as there is one GIANT GAPING HOLE in most Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity plans - where does rebuilding people's PCs fit in? Well, this solves that for us...

Installing XenServer via USB is fairly simple. There's a good post on Citrix's blog site about it. That entails using syslinux. We used Unetbootin, so I'll detail my steps rather than just leave that linkback.

• Download XenServer 5.6 - Note that Kaviza's not yet supported on higher versions, including the v6 beta.
• Download UNetbootin (Universal NetBoot Installer) from sourceforge.net. There is a HUGE caveat here - do not under any circumstances get the latest version (as of the date of this post). It will fail epically. You will need to get an older version, any of the 4-series will work (I used 494). Get that from here.
• Run UNetbootin, and choose Disk Image. Enter the path to your XenServer ISO.
• Relax while it runs.

You can then boot up from your stick and install (assuming you've remember to set the BIOS to allow USB booting) on your server and have a working XenServer install, sans DVD.

Getting the VMs out of XenServer and onto the stick was also a simple task. A good primer is right here. That article will give you the commands you need to build the shell script to export a VM, and then import it into the new XenServer. If you want to do this manually, you can just shut down the VMs and export them to a file, then import them to XenServer afterwards. Bear in mind that you might encounter the memory problem I blogged about earlier if you have a different amount of RAM in your new XenServer, and have some VM communication issues if you have a different NIC quantity. I know with our environment, a problem cropped up when we ADDED memory, and as I've never removed memory, I can't vouch for what happens in that direction.

We did this with our kMGR appliance and a baseline XP image (it was the smallest, and can run on the least memory) for the USB stick. Later, we'll be taking a 2TB USB hard drive and moving all of the images to it, along with our App-V sequencer and management server VMs and the data store. Both of these went into their own subfolders on the USB stick (\VMach\kMGR and \VMach\XPBase respectively). When all is said and done, we'll be able to install XenServer, import the appliance, import the VM, and configure a working environment from a single USB stick.