Vagrant-Xen

This project is used to provision a virtual machine with an installed xen hypervisor to help with the development of virtual machine introspection programs. Many tasks have been taken from https://github.com/wenzel/vagrant-xen.

Libvirt provider

• Install libvirt, ansible and vagrant.
• Run ansible-galaxy collections install -r requirements.yml.
• Run vagrant up

Hyper-V provider

Note that for nested virtualization a generation 2 Hyper-V virtual machine is required. The common generic/* boxes however only are generation 1.

See the corresponding github issue.

Install prerequisites

• Install Vagrant in both Windows and the WSL. Note that you need the same version in both.
• Install ansible inside the WSL.
• Run ansible-galaxy collections install -r requirements.yml.

Prepare the WSL

1. You need to tell the WSL to mount the Windows folder with metadata. For this edit the /etc/wsl.conf or create it if it does not exist.

[automount]
enabled = true
root = /mnt/
options = "metadata"
mountFsTab = true

2. Enable Hyper-V provider and allow the WSL to use Windows Vagrant by appending the following to ~/.profile

export VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER="hyperv"
export VAGRANT_WSL_ENABLE_WINDOWS_ACCESS="1"

3. Kill the WSL from Powershell and then restart it as administrator.

wsl.exe --list
wsl.exe --terminate <WSLNAME>

Provision the VM

1. run vagrant up or if Hyper-V is not the default provider vagrant up --provider="hyperv".
2. When prompted for the network switch use your newly created one.

Troubleshoot

If vagrant does not detect the started VM

Add a new external network switch to Hyper-V manager. The default settings should be sufficient.

Using virt-manager to connect to a VM in the Vagrant Box

• Run vagrant ssh-config in order to retrieve the path of the private key file
• Run ssh-add <path to private key file>
• Create a new remote Xen connection in virt-manager with user root and the IP address of the Vagrant VM (displayed in the output of vagrant ssh-config, for example)

Applying Xen patches

Currently only a single patch file is supported. Note that xen_patch_path in Vagrantfile needs to be adjusted accordingly in order to pick up the patch. If the patch file resides in the workspace root directory, the path should look something like ../xen.patch because ansible will interpret paths relative to the ansible directory.