Creating a Bootable USB Install Thumb drive for XenServer

Posted on April 11, 2014

Creating a Bootable USB Install Thumb drive for XenServer

We have a couple sites with XenServer VM machines, so part of our redundancy / failure plan is to be able to quickly isntall / reinstall a XenServer hypervisor.

THere are plenty of more involved methods with setting up PXE servers, etc. But the quickest / low tech method is to have a USB thumbdrive on hand.

So we can use one of the plethora of tools to create a USB thumbdrive, (unetbootin, USB to ISO, etc) but they all seem to have problems with the ISO, (OS not found, error with install, etc)

So I found one that works well

http://rufus.akeo.ie/

He keeps his software upto date it appears. Download it and run it, select your USB drive then check the box to ‘create a bootable disk using ISO Image, select the image to use from your hard drive. I downloaded the iso image from

http://xenserver.org/overview-xenserver-open-source-virtualization/download.html

– XenServer Installation ISO

Then just boot from the USB drive and the install should start.