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Xen Guest Utilities

Similar to how VMWare have its VMWare Tools for the guest VMs, Xen-based hypervisors like XCP-NG can utilize the Xen Guest Utilities tools to have guest VMs communicate better with the hypervisor. Those tools are software packages designed to enhance the performance and functionality of virtual machines (VMs) running on the hypervisors.

You can learn more about the various ways you can install the Xen Guest Utilities from the official documentation at https://xcp-ng.org/docs/guests.html#guest-tools 

In this guide, I will show you some of the methods I found to be easy for installing Xen Guest Utilities on VMs.

Debian and Debian-based OSes

You can download the guest tools directly from the source at https://github.com/xenserver/xe-guest-utilities 

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Under Releases, https://github.com/xenserver/xe-guest-utilities/releases, you can either download it manually if you have a Desktop GUI, or use wget from the SSH session to download the packages. As of 2023-10-17, the latest guest tool version is 8.3.1-1.

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#Debian uses .deb package files
wget https://github.com/xenserver/xe-guest-utilities/releases/download/v8.3.1/xe-guest-utilities_8.3.1-1_amd64.deb

Screenshot 2023-04-14 003723.png

You can use the -f flag to specify a package location for apt to look in and install from.

sudo apt install -f ./xe-guest-utilities_8.3.1-1_amd64.deb

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That's it! You do not need to restart the VM for the tool to take effect. If install successfully, you should see, in Xen Orchestra, that the Management Tools are detected. 

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