Xen: Checking the Hardware (Devices) of a Virtual Machine Host (System Configuration)

Practice



Task: display the equipment list, BIOS configuration, and the computer as a whole that Xen is running on. That is, we need to find out the CPU model, motherboard, occupied memory slots and their capacity, which controllers are installed, which hard drives, etc - and all of this needs to be found out on a virtual machine server running under the Xen hypervisor.


The solution is very simple: we need to look not at "hardware in Xen", but at "hardware in the control domain - i.e. in Domain0".

The thing is, the entire hardware layer falls under control through the control domain - i.e. Domain-0. And it's precisely from there that we can get access to the DMI BIOS, from which all the needed information is read.

We don't need to worry about how to jump into the hypervisor layer and do something from there. It's enough to log into Dom0 and run the dmidecode utility from there.

If Dom0: Debian
$ sudo dmidecode | less

If Dom0: CentOS or RedHat
$ sudo /usr/sbin/dmidecode | less

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Lectures and tutorial on "LINUX operating system"

Terms: LINUX operating system