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I recently started working with Xen, to try to make better use of an extra desktop box for development testing. I'd like to be able to do OS installs on it without having to burn discs, but I'm having some trouble actually being able to get it to boot OS ISOs from a Windows share. My Windows box is running Win 7, and it's on a domain. I created a CIFS ISO SR in Xen, specifying the correct username and password to use. Xen is able to scan the share, and I see the ISOs that are in the folder, and can select them in the list in XenCenter. However, when I try to start the VM, I get "Error: Starting VM 'linxcentos' - INVALID_SOURCE - Unable to access a required file in the specified repository: file:///tmp/cdrom-repo-hIz-H7/isolinux/vmlinuz."

I tried booting a different Linux ISO and got the same result. I know that the ISOs are valid because I was able to install them without issue when I tried VMWare ESXi earlier.

What am I missing here? It's Xen/XenCenter 6 and I'm trying to install the newest version of Centos. I may end up burning it for now, but I'd like to get this to work, at least just for the principle of not letting mysterious behaviors go unsolved...

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Figured it out- Turns out most of the VM templates marked as 'experimental' don't really work well. When using the 'other install media' template instead of the 'centos' one, it worked. – user85610 Dec 12 '11 at 19:54
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2 Answers

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Did you already tried to mount this shared point on your xen instead of binding it to the VM?

I mean, just mount locally the remote path, and then, attach your iso from this local path instead of trying to use the remote sharing at each VM start.

It will reduce the amount of auth message due to the fact that it will be your mount command which will perform a unique auth instead of each VM at each start.

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Thanks- ultimately that wasn't the issue, but it did give me some practice with mount and umount :) – user85610 Dec 12 '11 at 19:52
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When you say Xen, you mean Citrix XenServer. During the guest install form ISO do a "other media install". (Alternatively there are templates for many Linux distributions that use network install repositories).

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