Linux : Unable to connect to xend: No such file or directory. Is xend running?

By | February 9, 2014

Ending up with this kind of error booting a guest machine on your Xen hypervisor?

Running: xm create /cloud/config/hjxmogr553e5jx
Using config file “/cloud/config/hjxmogr553e5jx”.

Error: Unable to connect to xend: No such file or directory. Is xend running?

Fatal: Virtual machine has not been started on hypervisor
Executing Rollback…

The two possible causes would be the following :

– Service “xend” is not running on the host machine.

Make sure the service is running :

service xend status

If the service is stopped, just start it :

service xend start

– Your host machine is running on a “non-Xen” kernel.

Check out what kernel you are currently running first :

uname -a

The output should return something like this :

Linux hv01.domain.tld 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen #1 SMP Wed Jan 5 18:44:24 EST 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

If you do not see any mention of “xen” in the output, then you are running a standard non-Xen kernel. Verify your available kernels on the system :

rpm -qa kernel*

Make the proper change in your grub config file (/boot/grub/grub.conf) to make your host booting on the proper Xen kernel matching your installation and reboot your server. Edit the following value to make it default :

default=0