After many attempts and trying different methods I finally got an Ubuntu VM installed on an openSuSE 11.1 Xen Dom0 VM host.
The VM host has a minimal text install of openSuSE so I use the vm-install command to create my VMs quickly and easily. This has always worked fine for openSuSE VMs but I using the ‘Other Operating System’ vm-install just kept throwing “Error: The installation source is unusable”.
After trying a few of the other operating system options, I eventually found that choosing “Windows XP, 2003 (x64)” allowed the iso image of the install CD to boot the VM. (I’m installing Lucid Server amd64, for i386 version I would suggest the option “Windows XP, 2000, 2003″ although this has not been tested).
During installation, the VM is running in HVM Full Virtualisation mode, although once the installation has completed I modified the config file in order to boot the VM in paravirtualised mode.
