What You Need to Know About XenServer
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Citrix hosts a handy installation and administration guide for XenServer 7.
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My biggest complaint with XS is not having any simple method to attach a local ISO repository. Horribly critical flaw (not really).
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@JaredBusch said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
My biggest complaint with XS is not having any simple method to attach a local ISO repository. Horribly critical flaw (not really).
I think that the bigger flaw, and simpler one to address, is the silly defaulting to thick provisioning during the setup when no one knows what they want yet!
Although I do dislike the lack of local ISO repo option, that's just silly as it is so simple to address as well.
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@scottalanmiller said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@JaredBusch said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
My biggest complaint with XS is not having any simple method to attach a local ISO repository. Horribly critical flaw (not really).
I think that the bigger flaw, and simpler one to address, is the silly defaulting to thick provisioning during the setup when no one knows what they want yet!
Although I do dislike the lack of local ISO repo option, that's just silly as it is so simple to address as well.
Changing to thin provisioning is easy to handle in a walk through like this though. So while I do agree it is a nasty setting, it is one that is easily changed during install.
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Great write-up about XenServer. I'm going to book mark this for future reference.
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Very informative.
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@JaredBusch said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
My biggest complaint with XS is not having any simple method to attach a local ISO repository. Horribly critical flaw (not really).
Just create a minimal CentOS VM with an ISO disk-repo… five minutes of work, maybe!
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@scottalanmiller I think that the only "advanced step" is to put your hands into XAPI… what a powerful toolstack! Its logic is different than libvirt, but is just as capable, if not more! Create cronjobs and non-trivial scripts is very easy.
Maybe, something that is lacking is some form of integration with libguestfs, a KVM-centric set of tool that can do anything with disk images… for example, you can pull the cloud image of your favourite distro and inject ssh keys or passwords, completely skipping the installaton process. Maybe we will see something like that for windows, some day…
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This was posted at the perfect time, since I'm planning on putting Xenserver on my new box for my home network. Thanks!
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@Francesco-Provino said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@JaredBusch said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
My biggest complaint with XS is not having any simple method to attach a local ISO repository. Horribly critical flaw (not really).
Just create a minimal CentOS VM with an ISO disk-repo… five minutes of work, maybe!
I should whip up a script for making one that is designed just for people who don't know how to do that. A really simple script could set all of that up very easily.
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Main reason to have not thin pro by default is the quality of code for working on files rather than blocks (with LVM).
In file situation, XenServer has to write metadata twice (like in NFS situation by the way). Historically (and today until SmapiV3), the code managing files is a mess.
Personally, I never encountered problems using files (in fact I encountered less issues using NFS).
About ISOs repo: design pattern to work with ISO is shit. And that's really hard to do anything like this on our level (ie with XAPI calls). I hate this because people without XS knowledge often blame us for that
We can't stream ISOs, those repo are read only and everything you can imagine to be complicated to workaround. If you want to read more, see https://github.com/vatesfr/xo-web/issues/288 for discussion. -
@olivier said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
About ISOs repo: design pattern to work with ISO is shit. And that's really hard to do anything like this on our level (ie with XAPI calls). I hate this because people without XS knowledge often blame us for that
We can't stream ISOs, those repo are read only and everything you can imagine to be complicated to workaround. If you want to read more, see https://github.com/vatesfr/xo-web/issues/288 for discussion.What if XO was to include a checkbox option that would set up an NFS share from the XO host to store ISOs locally there (including a simple system for uploading, renaming and deleting) that would mount automatically to the XenServer hosts?
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@scottalanmiller That would:
- trigger a support shitstorm with people filling XOA disks
- we have no control inside customer infrastructure to know which XS host can access it and on which IP, eg in case of various DCs (cause of lot support ticket obviously) -> FYI, 90% of our support requests are for misconfigured XS or NFS/SMB mount.
Ideally, streaming the ISO would be great, but it's not really possible with how XS deal with this.
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@olivier An aside, have you considered selling general XS support? Even for those not necessarily running XO? Just wondered if it was ever considered as a lower cost alternative to inclusive support from Citrix might be a valuable market offering.
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A really simple solution to this (where do I put my ISOs) is to outline how simple it is to make a share, and connect to it via Xencenter.
A 1,2,3 guide to getting started with XenServer.
Outline the basic installation steps l, how to download XC, and how to get ISOs to the hypervisor.
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Also @olivier I think it would be a great opportunity as well for you to offer general XS support as well.
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@scottalanmiller said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@olivier An aside, have you considered selling general XS support? Even for those not necessarily running XO? Just wondered if it was ever considered as a lower cost alternative to inclusive support from Citrix might be a valuable market offering.
@DustinB3403 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Also @olivier I think it would be a great opportunity as well for you to offer general XS support as well.
I don't think you really imagine the colossal amount of work needed to do that. I got ONE customer with XS support included, and during the XS7 disk bug, I spent almost an entire week helping him. Multiply this by more or less 100, and you see the problem. It's not doable with our current size: we can't sell something we can't be sure to deliver. Plus we'll need a team able to be up 24/7, which needs around 8 people dedicated to at least having someone covering a time slot.
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@olivier you don't need to jump to offering it publicly until you can scale up. Offer it to a select client or two at most.
See how it progresses from there.
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@DustinB3403 That's exactly what I've done with one client, and I'm stopping there.
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@olivier said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@DustinB3403 That's exactly what I've done with one client, and I'm stopping there.
Ah, I misunderstood your last post, I thought it was theoretical
