Connecting to a Linux console in XenServer is is easy as xl console, but slightly more difficult with a Windows VM since the terminal can’t display the Windows GUI. SSH tunneling and VNC to the rescue. First, grab the VNC port the Windows VM uses with the following command. You’ll need the dom-id of the Windows VM. xl list or xe vm-list name-label=YourWindowsNameLabel params=dom-id to find it. ...
I had tried to passthrough my LSI SAS1068E to a virtual machine in XenServer 6.0 or 6.1, I forget, but I couldn’t get it working for some reason. I didn’t troubleshoot it very much though, a few Google searches seemed to point to my whitebox setup and driver/support issues. Recently, XenServer 6.2 was released so I thought I would try this again on my whitebox server. To my surprise I was able to get PCI passthrough working pretty easily on 6.2. For this setup I’m using a XenServer 6.2 host with a LSI SAS1068E card set to IT mode, so RAID is disabled and the card is JBOD, with Ubuntu Server 12.04 as the guest OS using the LSI card and being able to access the drives attached to it. ...