Running Citrix XenMobile Appliance on Linux KVM

Citrix XenMobile is one of famous Enterprise Mobile Management (EMM) solution. It is released in form of virtual appliance for hypervisor : Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere. If your environment are all Linux KVM, how do you deploy it ?

I will show you one way for that.

Notes: Bolded phases are the job needed to do.

Firstly,  you have have to download the virtual appliance for vSphere i.e. ESXi

e.g. xms_10.4.0.116.vmware.ova  available at (login may be required) https://www.citrix.com/content/citrix/en_us/downloads/xenmobile.html

ova file is actually a tarball. Extract it easily by "tar xvf " 

ovf file is for vSphere deployment only, useless here. mf file is also useless here.

You need to convert this opt.vmdk into  KVM supported disk format e.g. qcow2, img, vhdx...
We use qcow2 here for example.

qemu-img  is a tool available in many Linux distribution e.g. Ubuntu, CentOS...

Copy the qcow2 file to your KVM host storage.

Then, we will use this qcow2 file as virtual disk to create a KVM virtual machine by virt-manager, useful KVM GUI, similar function to vSphere client in VMware vSphere .

In Virt-manager,  click the icon on left-hand corner

1. select "Import exist disk image" and click "Forward"

2. Broswe for the qcow2 file

Select OS Type "Linux" , version "CentOS 6.5" 

Click "Forward"

3. Assign CPU and Memory

Click "Forward"

4. Give it a Name, check box "Customize configuration before install" click "Finish".

Before boot it up, you need to change several virtual hardware (important !)

1. Change disk type to SATA

2. change network card to e1000

3. Change Display from Spice to VNC if needed and remove other stuffs like "Console", "USB redirect"...

4. click "Begin Installation" and virtual machine will boot up. Once you get the following screen, XenMobile is running on KVM host now.

5. Finally, follow "Configure XenMobile for First-Time Use" 
instruction at http://docs.citrix.com/en-us/xenmobile/10-4/install-configure.html

Thank you.