Converting to a virtual environment
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@BRRABill said in Converting to a virtual environment:
@scottalanmiller said
This is where I don't agree. More people running it is not the same as peer support. Look both here and SW, for example, more people running Hyper-V, but lots more confusion, misinformation, mistakes and much less support. Ask a question on either and you get a lot of responses, but I feel that the support that people get on XS, even if the peer pool is smaller, is superior.
Also depends if your Windows knowledge is mainly GUI-based.
I doubt that that is true. Or at least in such a high level way.
If you are a 100% command line / PowerShell Windows admin, Hyper-V is just more of the same. It basically makes Hyper-V as easy for Windows Admins and Xen without a GUI is for Linux ones. Which is... very simple.
If you are a 100% remote GUI Windows Admin, Hyper-V has great remote tools that are just like the ones that you use for Windows that way. So again, very easy.
But if you are a Windows local GUI admin doing everything right on the server, especially with old versions that don't use the same tools as your Hyper-V would, or you don't have an up to date desktop infrastructure then no, the GUI tools is not just learning new tools but new ways of thinking and approaching administration that can be very confusing and a huge learning curve. It's this mode that nearly all SMB admins that I talk to work in.
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@coliver said in Converting to a virtual environment:
@BRRABill said in Converting to a virtual environment:
@scottalanmiller said
And I think an important lesson for newbies is... while running from SD is great and a best practice for experts, if you are not an expert on XS, just install to the local the disks. Keep the deployment simple.
Well, in my defense, it was stated pretty repeatedly that NOT installing XS to SD/USB was something a newbie would do, not the other way around.
XS themselves basically say treat it as an appliance. Install it and don't mess with it.
Pretty much what I've seen as well. Work through a management interface and rarely go down to the CLI.
Yup, there is a reason that we promote it as the easiest to use, easiest to learn, least learning curve hypervisor (except maybe VMware ESXi which forces some things like hardware RAID to make things easier. ESXi is really SO easy.) It installs as an appliance, the only caveat is that you HAVE to know to select "thin provisioning" during the install.
XenCenter is dead simple to use for a Windows admin and gets you up and running in minutes. It's the simplest Windows app there can be. It's just like VMware's traditional tools. And we have a one line installer for XenOrchestra which makes it super simple to get a free, no-OS license needed VM with huge features right away without needing to know anything special there, either.
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@BRRABill said in Converting to a virtual environment:
@scottalanmiller said
And I think an important lesson for newbies is... while running from SD is great and a best practice for experts, if you are not an expert on XS, just install to the local the disks. Keep the deployment simple.
Well, in my defense, it was stated pretty repeatedly that NOT installing XS to SD/USB was something a newbie would do, not the other way around.
XS themselves basically say treat it as an appliance. Install it and don't mess with it.
Yeah, and while I feel that SD is the best option technically, I'm changing my recommendations for most users based on how difficult it has been to get XS to treat the SD card like it should. Hopefully at some point we will be able to produce a super simple guide for that, but for now, we cannot. Partially because I can't get access to even a desktop to work on that stuff physically which is pretty much needed for this kind of testing.
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@scottalanmiller said
Yeah, and while I feel that SD is the best option technically, I'm changing my recommendations for most users based on how difficult it has been to get XS to treat the SD card like it should. Hopefully at some point we will be able to produce a super simple guide for that, but for now, we cannot. Partially because I can't get access to even a desktop to work on that stuff physically which is pretty much needed for this kind of testing.
I'm not sure if you can hear it, but the collection of XS here is quietly booing you.
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@scottalanmiller said
Yeah, and while I feel that SD is the best option technically, I'm changing my recommendations for most users based on how difficult it has been to get XS to treat the SD card like it should. Hopefully at some point we will be able to produce a super simple guide for that, but for now, we cannot. Partially because I can't get access to even a desktop to work on that stuff physically which is pretty much needed for this kind of testing.
As I have been looking into this, and also backups (in the name of recovering a XS host), I"m wondering if installing to a separate drive, and just doing the backups of the host won;'t be the easiest way to recover from a failed XS host.
Again, that is basically the recommendation of XS, strangely enough from the same paragraph referenced earlier.
"Citrix recommends that, whenever possible, you leave the installed state of XenServer hosts unaltered. That is,
do not install any additional packages or start additional services on XenServer hosts, and treat them as if they
are appliances. The best way to restore, then, is to reinstall XenServer host software from the installation media." -
@scottalanmiller said in Converting to a virtual environment:
Hopefully at some point we will be able to produce a super simple guide for that, but for now, we cannot. Partially because I can't get access to even a desktop to work on that stuff physically which is pretty much needed for this kind of testing.
Considering they are basically saying .... yeah don't touch anything .... maybe it's just not possible.
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@BRRABill said in Converting to a virtual environment:
@scottalanmiller said
Yeah, and while I feel that SD is the best option technically, I'm changing my recommendations for most users based on how difficult it has been to get XS to treat the SD card like it should. Hopefully at some point we will be able to produce a super simple guide for that, but for now, we cannot. Partially because I can't get access to even a desktop to work on that stuff physically which is pretty much needed for this kind of testing.
As I have been looking into this, and also backups (in the name of recovering a XS host), I"m wondering if installing to a separate drive, and just doing the backups of the host won;'t be the easiest way to recover from a failed XS host.
Again, that is basically the recommendation of XS, strangely enough from the same paragraph referenced earlier.
"Citrix recommends that, whenever possible, you leave the installed state of XenServer hosts unaltered. That is,
do not install any additional packages or start additional services on XenServer hosts, and treat them as if they
are appliances. The best way to restore, then, is to reinstall XenServer host software from the installation media."Their recommendations are telling you NOT to backup the host. Why jump to backing up the host? We don't backup any hypervisor (VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM, etc.) It's just not practical. It's essentially stateless. What state it keeps is generally minor and handled some other way (doesn't XO or XC recreate most of that automatically?) I feel like this is a similar thought process to imaging the desktops for recovery that you used to want to do... sounds good at a high level but in practice, isn't practical. Just reinstall XS and be on your way.
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@BRRABill said in Converting to a virtual environment:
@scottalanmiller said in Converting to a virtual environment:
Hopefully at some point we will be able to produce a super simple guide for that, but for now, we cannot. Partially because I can't get access to even a desktop to work on that stuff physically which is pretty much needed for this kind of testing.
Considering they are basically saying .... yeah don't touch anything .... maybe it's just not useful.
FTFY
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@scottalanmiller said
Their recommendations are telling you NOT to backup the host. Why jump to backing up the host? We don't backup any hypervisor (VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM, etc.) It's just not practical. It's essentially stateless. What state it keeps is generally minor and handled some other way (doesn't XO or XC recreate most of that automatically?) I feel like this is a similar thought process to imaging the desktops for recovery that you used to want to do... sounds good at a high level but in practice, isn't practical. Just reinstall XS and be on your way.
No, they recommend backing up the host.
Basically, if you backup the host, and also backup the VM metadata, it's supposedly pretty easy to restore.
The host through XC and the metadata through xsconsole. (The metadata can be scheduled, even.)
(AND AND it writes to the place where the logs kept screwing up the XS. But it writes it as a VHD, of course.)
SO they you reinstall XS, restore it from backup, introduce the SR, and restore the metadata. -
@BRRABill said in Converting to a virtual environment:
@scottalanmiller said
Yeah, and while I feel that SD is the best option technically, I'm changing my recommendations for most users based on how difficult it has been to get XS to treat the SD card like it should. Hopefully at some point we will be able to produce a super simple guide for that, but for now, we cannot. Partially because I can't get access to even a desktop to work on that stuff physically which is pretty much needed for this kind of testing.
As I have been looking into this, and also backups (in the name of recovering a XS host), I"m wondering if installing to a separate drive, and just doing the backups of the host won;'t be the easiest way to recover from a failed XS host.
Again, that is basically the recommendation of XS, strangely enough from the same paragraph referenced earlier.
"Citrix recommends that, whenever possible, you leave the installed state of XenServer hosts unaltered. That is,
do not install any additional packages or start additional services on XenServer hosts, and treat them as if they
are appliances. The best way to restore, then, is to reinstall XenServer host software from the installation media."You said right here, this may be a different topic all together. That they recommend that you restore the host by installing it from the media. That would imply that you don't backup the host itself at all.
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@coliver said
You said right here, this may be a different topic all together. That they recommend that you restore the host by installing it from the media. That would imply that you don't backup the host itself at all.
Then the next page they say
"Citrix recommends that you frequently perform as many of the following backup procedures as possible to
recover from possible server and/or software failure."And go into the backups I mention.
This only works for the original machine, though. But I imagine that you could replicate this on a new XS (by attaching the SR and restore metadata) pretty "easily".
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@BRRABill said in Converting to a virtual environment:
@scottalanmiller said
Their recommendations are telling you NOT to backup the host. Why jump to backing up the host? We don't backup any hypervisor (VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM, etc.) It's just not practical. It's essentially stateless. What state it keeps is generally minor and handled some other way (doesn't XO or XC recreate most of that automatically?) I feel like this is a similar thought process to imaging the desktops for recovery that you used to want to do... sounds good at a high level but in practice, isn't practical. Just reinstall XS and be on your way.
No, they recommend backing up the host.
Basically, if you backup the host, and also backup the VM metadata, it's supposedly pretty easy to restore.
The host through XC and the metadata through xsconsole. (The metadata can be scheduled, even.)
(AND AND it writes to the place where the logs kept screwing up the XS. But it writes it as a VHD, of course.)
SO they you reinstall XS, restore it from backup, introduce the SR, and restore the metadata.Is the metadata on the SR?
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@BRRABill said in Converting to a virtual environment:
@scottalanmiller said
Is the metadata on the SR?
Yes.
It makes a .VHD file when you do the backup.
That's what I thought. So if the metadata is being backed up with the VMs in place, what would you be restoring for the host?
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This is one area where I feel that XO is missing an option to backup the host / metadata to a separate location. If you need to rebuild the XO host (on SD) without restoring all the VMs (local storage), how does one accomplish this if you haven't backed up the above info?
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@Danp said in Converting to a virtual environment:
This is one area where I feel that XO is missing an option to backup the host / metadata to a separate location. If you need to rebuild the XO host (on SD) without restoring all the VMs (local storage), how does one accomplish this if you haven't backed up the above info?
But if the metadata isn't on the host, and XS says that you should not back that up, why would you want XO to have an option for that? Just rebuild from the installer (think of this as being pre-backed up) and the metadata is already available.
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@scottalanmiller said
That's what I thought. So if the metadata is being backed up with the VMs in place, what would you be restoring for the host?
The host is backed up to your local machine through XC.
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@BRRABill said in Converting to a virtual environment:
@scottalanmiller said
That's what I thought. So if the metadata is being backed up with the VMs in place, what would you be restoring for the host?
The host is backed up to your local machine through XC.
Is there a benefit to that?
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@scottalanmiller said in Converting to a virtual environment:
@BRRABill said in Converting to a virtual environment:
@scottalanmiller said
That's what I thought. So if the metadata is being backed up with the VMs in place, what would you be restoring for the host?
The host is backed up to your local machine through XC.
Is there a benefit to that?
That's a good question.
It is basically host configuration, I guess.
If you had a lot of settings changed (such as if there were a lot of pool members, etc.) maybe it is valuable.
This is a good article I have been working off of:
http://techblog.danielpellarini.com/sysadmin/steps-to-take-to-restore-xenserver-from-backup/But I am assuming since Citrix says to take regular backups of the host, perhaps it is needed. But perhaps not.
This is one of those times it would be great to have someone from there on here to say ... yeah, definitely or no you're crazy!
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@Danp said in Converting to a virtual environment:
This is one area where I feel that XO is missing an option to backup the host / metadata to a separate location. If you need to rebuild the XO host (on SD) without restoring all the VMs (local storage), how does one accomplish this if you haven't backed up the above info?
It can be done. There is apparently a "try my best" type option.
But it would be best to have this info, without question.
Why it's not INCLUDED somewhere, don't ask me. Like a small config file in the SR that does mapping.
But since you can automate the backing up of the metadata, perhaps they feel like the functionality is already there.
