What You Need to Know About XenServer

scottalanmiller

@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.

olivier

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.

scottalanmiller

@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?

olivier

@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.

scottalanmiller

@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

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.

DustinB3403

Also @olivier I think it would be a great opportunity as well for you to offer general XS support as well.

olivier

@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.

DustinB3403

@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.

olivier

@DustinB3403 That's exactly what I've done with one client, and I'm stopping there.

DustinB3403

@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

olivier

@DustinB3403 No that was real ^^

wirestyle22

@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 completely agree.

wirestyle22

"Use your RAID card to expose to logical volumes (disks) to XS directly. Give it one small one, like 70GB, for XenServer itself. And all the rest for the SR (VM storage.) [If you lack this functionality or are not familiar with this process, post a question here in ML and include the RAID controller that you are using so that we can assist!]"

Hi! So I have a Dell PERC H700. Looked around inside of the PERC settings and didn't see a way to do this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

scottalanmiller

@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:

"Use your RAID card to expose to logical volumes (disks) to XS directly. Give it one small one, like 70GB, for XenServer itself. And all the rest for the SR (VM storage.) [If you lack this functionality or are not familiar with this process, post a question here in ML and include the RAID controller that you are using so that we can assist!]"

Hi! So I have a Dell PERC H700. Looked around inside of the PERC settings and didn't see a way to do this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Looking through the H700 manual, it does not appear to support logical volumes on the RAID card.

wirestyle22

@scottalanmiller said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:

@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:

"Use your RAID card to expose to logical volumes (disks) to XS directly. Give it one small one, like 70GB, for XenServer itself. And all the rest for the SR (VM storage.) [If you lack this functionality or are not familiar with this process, post a question here in ML and include the RAID controller that you are using so that we can assist!]"

Hi! So I have a Dell PERC H700. Looked around inside of the PERC settings and didn't see a way to do this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Looking through the H700 manual, it does not appear to support logical volumes on the RAID card.

Good to know it's not me. Thanks!

BRRABill

@wirestyle22

What I ended up doing (though I didn't use it, used USB/SD which I am looking to move away from) was just setting up two small disks as a separate RAID1 array just for the boot device.

$140ish from xByte so not crazy expensive.

olivier

@BRRABill I like use refurb parts for that, like https://www.servershop24.de/en/components/controller/sas/hp-smart-array-p400-raid-controller-256-mb-sas-pci-e-447029-001-low-profile/a-105422/

Unbeatable price/perf ratio.

wirestyle22

@BRRABill I did run into complications while trying to create an ISO Library. It seems pretty unintuitive to me.

mkdir -p /var/opt/xen/ISO_Lib

xe sr-create name-label=LocalISO type=iso device-config:location=/var/opt/xen/ISO_Store device-config:legacy_mode=true content-type=iso

cd /var/opt/xen/ISO_Lib

I then ran into issues locating the actual link so I could wget

I found this one eventually: http://care.dlservice.microsoft.com/download/7/5/E/75EC4E54-5B02-42D6-8879-D8D3A25FBEF7/7601.17514.101119-1850_x64fre_server_eval_en-us-GRMSXEVAL_EN_DVD.iso?lcid=1033&cprod=WinSvr2

I didn't see any failure notifications. However, there was also no ISO's listed in the library.

I ran df -h to find disk usage and it didn't have enough space so I switched to my 8 TB GPT Partition.

cd /var/run/sr-mount/etc etc etc code/

Then I went through the process of creating another directory. I moved it to the new ISO_Lib folder and ran this:

xe sr-create name-label=ISO_Lib type=iso device-config:location=/var/run/sr-mount/etc etc etc code/ISO_Storage device-config:legacy_mode=true content-type=iso

To make it an ISO library. Nothing is listed in there. Is it me or this so much just to create local storage?

DustinB3403

@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:

@BRRABill I did run into complications while trying to create an ISO Library. It seems pretty unintuitive to me.

mkdir -p /var/opt/xen/ISO_Lib

xe sr-create name-label=LocalISO type=iso device-config:location=/var/opt/xen/ISO_Store device-config:legacy_mode=true content-type=iso

cd /var/opt/xen/ISO_Lib

I then ran into issues locating the actual link so I could wget

I found this one eventually: http://care.dlservice.microsoft.com/download/7/5/E/75EC4E54-5B02-42D6-8879-D8D3A25FBEF7/7601.17514.101119-1850_x64fre_server_eval_en-us-GRMSXEVAL_EN_DVD.iso?lcid=1033&cprod=WinSvr2

I didn't see any failure notifications. However, there was also no ISO's listed in the library.

I ran df -h to find disk usage and it didn't have enough space so I switched to my 8 TB GPT Partition.

cd /var/run/sr-mount/etc etc etc code/

Then I went through the process of creating another directory. I moved it to the new ISO_Lib folder and ran this:

xe sr-create name-label=ISO_Lib type=iso device-config:location=/var/run/sr-mount/etc etc etc code/ISO_Storage device-config:legacy_mode=true content-type=iso

To make it an ISO library. Nothing is listed in there. Is it me or this so much just to create local storage?

The reason being that LOCAL repo's aren't supported, is that it literally takes nothing to share out a drive from a windows desktop and connect to it via XenCenter (or XO).

It's a 5 minute process.