BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer
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@Dashrender said:
I'm guessing the insite you have to Windows VHDs is the nature that it's Windows on Windows, but if it was a Linux VM, I'm guessing you wouldn't get that information.
Setting up a test of that as we speak.
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@BRRABill said:
I just like to know hey ... this virtual disk is only 10% full without going into the VM itself to check. Pretty easy to do in Hyper-V. I figured it was in XC/XO as well, but I was just missing it.
You mean you want to know how utilized the filesystem is inside of the VM?
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@BRRABill said:
I guess my thinking was that if you overprovisioned a bit, and one of your servers was going nuts, it would be nice to easily see which one it was.
If you overprovision, that wouldn't be what told you. That's not the right information for that problem.
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@BRRABill said:
But there should be checks on the individual servers to prevent that from happening.
No, you need to either not overprovision or you need to monitor to make sure that you don't run out of space. The individual machines have no idea.
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@scottalanmiller said:
You mean you want to know how utilized the filesystem is inside of the VM?
Yes.
BTW: I installed Ubuntu on my Hyper-V box, and it still shows the usage.
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@scottalanmiller said:
No, you need to either not overprovision or you need to monitor to make sure that you don't run out of space. The individual machines have no idea.
Right, that I understand.
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And don't mind that file in "Public" ... this isn't production.
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@BRRABill said:
And don't mind that file in "Public" ... this isn't production.
That is the default Hyper-V storage location actually.
I have no clue why they chose that. Even for a full Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 instance it does that by default.
I always change it to >DRIVE<:\Hyper-V\Virtual Hard Disks
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@JaredBusch said:
That is the default Hyper-V storage location actually.
I have no clue why they chose that. Even for a full Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 instance it does that by default.
I always change it to >DRIVE<:\Hyper-V\Virtual Hard Disks
I just figured it would freak someone out that I was doing that if they didn't know.
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For people using Xen or KVM, what do you use for backups?
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@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You mean you want to know how utilized the filesystem is inside of the VM?
Yes.
BTW: I installed Ubuntu on my Hyper-V box, and it still shows the usage.
That is showing the size on disk, not the amount used in the FS. You don't know how much the disk itself has used.
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@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You mean you want to know how utilized the filesystem is inside of the VM?
Yes.
BTW: I installed Ubuntu on my Hyper-V box, and it still shows the usage.
nah.. that's not the same thing...
Now go and fill that disk up with a 20 GB file..
then look..
then delete the file
then look.
I'm willing to bet a beer that when you delete the 20 GB file, the file size shown in that window you posted above will show the same as pre deletion or larger. -
@wrx7m said:
For people using Xen or KVM, what do you use for backups?
For Xen there are a handful of options, Unitrends for Xen or Xen Orchestra.
For KVM any quest agent would likely work, but are you specifically asking at the Hypervisor level or the Guest level?
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@scottalanmiller said:
That is showing the size on disk, not the amount used in the FS. You don't know how much the disk itself has used.
I guess that is what I am looking to find out.
How much space the virtual disk is taking up on the host storage drive.
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@wrx7m said:
For people using Xen or KVM, what do you use for backups?
Well....
- XenServer, but not Xen otherwise, can do backups via Xen Orchestra
- Unitrends has a XenServer API based offering for commercial image based backups
- StorageCraft is being used by several people that I know.
- NAUBackup is available for free for Xen, it's a script
- Any agent based traditional backup works just fine.
- Our KVM is from Scale and Scale has a backup mechanism included
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@Dashrender yes, exactly. The size on disk will remain large even if the file system is unused. It's useful info, but not the info he's expecting.
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@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
That is showing the size on disk, not the amount used in the FS. You don't know how much the disk itself has used.
I guess that is what I am looking to find out.
How much space the virtual disk is taking up on the host storage drive.
Not that you shouldn't want to know that but, I'm wondering, how do you intend to use that information? How will it help you with decision making?
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@DustinB3403 At the hypervisor level. I am most familiar with VMware and I use Veeam.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Not that you shouldn't want to know that but, I'm wondering, how do you intend to use that information? How will it help you with decision making?
I guess I was just curious.
If I am taking the approach of ... just install and not worry, then I in reality don't really need to know.
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I'm sure that it is often handy to know which VM is eating up space in case you are going to go do some storage load balancing. But in a case where you are preparing to do that, running a du command against the storage is pretty trivial.
