What You Need to Know About XenServer
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@Francesco-Provino said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@olivier or via cloudinit, exactly, I just forgot to add it.
The thing is we already have CloudInit support, so it would be a shame to not using it
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@BRRABill said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
My new take on XS is to not touch XS. It's like Fight Club.
The easy way for ISOs I found was...
a) set up a new Linux Mint VM
b) set up an anonymous share
c) add ISOs
d) doneWindows works, but it;s hard to do anonymous shares, I've always found. You could create a user, which I did initially, but I've since moved to a small Mint instance and haven't looked back.
That's a way to do it also yes. In general, I've got always a physical machine (eg for backup) with enough space to do that. Doesn't require much bandwidth and power to simply share ISOs.
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Thoughts @scottalanmiller ?
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@olivier said
That's a way to do it also yes. In general, I've got always a physical machine (eg for backup) with enough space to do that. Doesn't require much bandwidth and power to simply share ISOs.
Yeah, just giving options.
There are many.
Anything that can share files would work. I just find sharing files anonymously through Windows maddening.
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@BRRABill said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@olivier said
That's a way to do it also yes. In general, I've got always a physical machine (eg for backup) with enough space to do that. Doesn't require much bandwidth and power to simply share ISOs.
Yeah, just giving options.
There are many.
Anything that can share files would work. I just find sharing files anonymously through Windows maddening.
I have no idea, last time I tried it was 10 years ago.
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@olivier said
I have no idea, last time I tried it was 10 years ago.
It's probably why you moved on!
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If I shared my SSD on my desktop how would I handle the permissions for mounting in XS? I did attempt this but it failed. Granted I had to leave immediately after and didnt get the chance to troubleshoot it.
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@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
If I shared my SSD on my desktop how would I handle the permissions for mounting? I did attempt this but it failed. Granted I had to leave immediately after and didnt get the chance to troubleshoot it.
You could create a local account on your machine, give it access to the shared directory, and use that when you mount from XS.
That's what I did initially.
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@BRRABill said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
If I shared my SSD on my desktop how would I handle the permissions for mounting? I did attempt this but it failed. Granted I had to leave immediately after and didnt get the chance to troubleshoot it.
You could create a local account on your machine, give it access to the shared directory, and use that when you mount from XS.
That's what I did initially.
I'll give this all a go when I get home and report back. Thanks everyone!
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Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
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@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
I think the general consensus is to start with one core and add more if performance sucks.
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@dafyre said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
I think the general consensus is to start with one core and add more if performance sucks.
Virtual?
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@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@dafyre said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
I think the general consensus is to start with one core and add more if performance sucks.
Virtual?
Always! You should have a reason to be physical otherwise virtual.
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@wirestyle22 Sorry, yeah.
Unless you're running a lot of heavily used VMs, a dual or quadcore CPU would be fine. My box at home runs a quad core cpu and has 5 or 6 VMs on it with no issues.
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@coliver said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@dafyre said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
I think the general consensus is to start with one core and add more if performance sucks.
Virtual?
Always! You should have a reason to be physical otherwise virtual.
Just for my own knowledge, what would be a good reason to go physical? Just for a point of reference.
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@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@coliver said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@dafyre said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
I think the general consensus is to start with one core and add more if performance sucks.
Virtual?
Always! You should have a reason to be physical otherwise virtual.
Just for my own knowledge, what would be a good reason to go physical? Just for a point of reference.
Again... General concensus around here is the only thing you need Physical for is to install the hypervisor. Everything should be virtual these days.
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@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@coliver said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@dafyre said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
I think the general consensus is to start with one core and add more if performance sucks.
Virtual?
Always! You should have a reason to be physical otherwise virtual.
Just for my own knowledge, what would be a good reason to go physical? Just for a point of reference.
Maybe NAS/SAN storage, where massive I/Os and scalability is needed (note that you can connect a massive SAN/NAS to a pool so...).
Also, even real-time operations could be done with an Hypervisor now (Xen is going at full speed in automotive industry, via XenRT and Xen ARM projects).
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@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@coliver said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@dafyre said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
I think the general consensus is to start with one core and add more if performance sucks.
Virtual?
Always! You should have a reason to be physical otherwise virtual.
Just for my own knowledge, what would be a good reason to go physical? Just for a point of reference.
If you have a reason to install physical you will know it. The reasons are so rare that you will most likely never run into one.
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@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
There is some nice performance monitoring built right into XC and XO. That's a good place to watch and see if anything (CPU, RAM, etc.) needs to be increased.
@scottalanmiller ... one more thing you might want to add to your initial writeup is to install the XenTools onto each VM for optimal performance monitoring and VM functionality
P.S. @wirestyle22 install the XenTools on your VMs if you haven't already. You'll find them on the ISO repository. Just inser the tools ISO and run it.
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I'm currently writing a complete guide/blog post on Xen tools.
