Using vmware I have a generic machine file that I use to quickly stand  up a vm  then customize as I need.  It's a tgz that I use and occasionally unpack and  patch to keep the OS on the generic vm up to date. I'm looking to be able to do that with Xen, but I'm not sure  what files I need to have included in my tarball.

I tried it once without success but had to abandon it (business  reasons) before I figured it out.  The files I used at the time were from the /usr/lib/xen/images and /etc/xen/vm.  (I understand paths might be different depending on OS.)  Basically I grabbed the actual disk image and what I thought were the  xen config files for that vm. I put the files on a new machine and was able to start it using the virtual machine mgr in openSuSE,  but could never get a console sesson.  When I tried it on the command  line with xm, it would just  hang.  I didn't see any errors in the messages or xen log files erroring when I started the vm.

Since I can't go back and try to finish that test, I wondered if there's resource  someone could point me at to plan this out and give it another shot.