HowTo: enable XCP 1.1 snapshots inside Citrix XenCenter

By default (out of the box?) XenCenter on windows can’t take snapshots of running XCP VMs, even though you can do this from the command line. Here’s how to fix that with two commands!

We need to convince XenCenter we’re a fully functioning hypervisor, which we can do by forcing a version string inside each XCP hypervisor. Log in to the command line console of each hypervisor and type:

Console - root@hostname ~ #

1
2 echo "5.6.100" > /etc/xensource/xapi_version_override
/etc/init.d/xapi restart

And re-establish your Citrix XenCenter connection to that hypervisor. This information (and the rest of the XCP 1.1 fixes for the guest machines if you’re having issues there) is available at: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/XenCenterXCP

A nifty side effect of this is clicking the performance tab on a VM will no longer crash XenCenter, which is a welcome fix.

Go by ##xen on irc.freenode.net and say hi to the good folks there some time!