How Complete is XenServer Really
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I can say this, coming from ESXi to XenServer was almost painless, it saved my arse. But please oh please learn about XO because I had to get help from the community because I had a poorly thought up backup plan (aka didn't make it that far) and it came back to bite me in the arse.
I think install XenServer compared to ESXi is about equal except for I can install to ESXi to a USB like it requires nothing
That had to be my biggest draw to ESXi. Outside of that, I mean managing XS is actually kinda straight forward but I think the way the gui works its better than ESX it just takes getting used to.Adding hard drives is my current dilemma
thats where in my test environment I'm getting painnnnnnnnnnnn. But once you put it on a proper raid / server you should be fine. -
Hope you don't mind some questions.
@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
I can say this, coming from ESXi to XenServer was almost painless, it saved my arse. But please oh please learn about XO because I had to get help from the community because I had a poorly thought up backup plan (aka didn't make it that far) and it came back to bite me in the arse.
Did you use XO at all before you realized your backups weren't there?
I think install XenServer compared to ESXi is about equal
Did you use local storage? If so, how large is/was your SR?
except for I can install to ESXi to a USB like it requires nothing
That had to be my biggest draw to ESXi.Actually, install XS to USB is as easy or easier than installing ESXi to USB.
Outside of that, I mean managing XS is actually kinda straight forward but I think the way the gui works its better than ESX it just takes getting used to.
When you say it's easier in XS, is that in XC or XO or both? What makes it easier/better? Did you ever have to remount a datastore in ESXi compared to doing so in XS?
Adding hard drives is my current dilemma
thats where in my test environment I'm getting painnnnnnnnnnnn. But once you put it on a proper raid / server you should be fine.Did you ever add additional storage in your ESXi - if yes, was it easier/harder? What about doing this in XS is hard/painful?
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@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
XS may not be complete, but isn't it the "most complete" of all options available?
what does that mean? most complete?
More complete than other options. What else comes with as many pieces as XS does, at least when XO is included?
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No, I was just testing it. I had used it 1 year prior, I used Ghetto method before.
Small storage just under 600 GB / SSD
Yea installing ESXi to usb is so easy I wish they all could be so simple.
It is easier to me but I have used all 3 - Hyper-V, ESXi and XS and between the 3, I favored XS. But if your use to windows tools I find it hard to believe one wouldn't love hyper-v and 9nine tools. I did have to remount the data store and it was painful because I didn't have a proper backup, I still made it work but wow I had some downtime. Had I spent more time getting used to XO I wouldn't have had the issue.
Adding storage to ESXi was pretty straight forward. I used iscsi, local drives, raid 1, raid 10. I went nuts. That was for testing purposes and for learning.
When I do my entire infrastructure over, I'm going full XS+X0 with Windows Server Data Center 2012 to as of now, just 1 host with a minimum of 32 GB of RAM with RAID 10 Storage hopefully using 15K drives. I have to shoot for the moon because i'm part of a non profit. My storage needs are kinda paltry. at the moment 1-2 tb is almost more than enough for all my VMs and really I could get by with 1 TB. My actual file server is where I'm rethinking my strategy as I split my nas using iscci to handle some of FS requirements and instead will stop us using my for split storage (vms/shares) and let it just be for backup.
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@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
XS may not be complete, but isn't it the "most complete" of all options available?
what does that mean? most complete?
More complete than other options. What else comes with as many pieces as XS does, at least when XO is included?
KVM. Qemu and libvirt do pretty much everything. Qemu even does dirty bitmap for incremental backups.
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@stacksofplates said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
XS may not be complete, but isn't it the "most complete" of all options available?
what does that mean? most complete?
More complete than other options. What else comes with as many pieces as XS does, at least when XO is included?
KVM. Qemu and libvirt do pretty much everything. Qemu even does dirty bitmap for incremental backups.
Libvert is an API, though. That's like XS with XAPI. What does the GUI for a cluster look like with KVM and libvert?
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Im no Tobias Kreidl, but my experience with XS is great so far. I only have XO free right now so i cant speak to that, although it looks great and even the free version helped me solve some problem i had after live storage move failed.
I had a problem when i started here that had existed for years with storage timeouts; i fixed that and it really just goes now. It has live migration and live storage migration built in. Upgrades every 3 weeks or so. Lots of new stuff has been added since 6.2>7
Live storage migration dose mess up quite a bit though; it is best to shutdown a vm and then move the storage that way.Long as youre not trying to do the usb boot thing and use lvm there should be 0 problems in my experience.
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@scottalanmiller said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@stacksofplates said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
XS may not be complete, but isn't it the "most complete" of all options available?
what does that mean? most complete?
More complete than other options. What else comes with as many pieces as XS does, at least when XO is included?
KVM. Qemu and libvirt do pretty much everything. Qemu even does dirty bitmap for incremental backups.
Libvert is an API, though. That's like XS with XAPI. What does the GUI for a cluster look like with KVM and libvert?
That's all done in Virt-Manager. The different nodes have the list of VMs on each.
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@scottalanmiller said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@stacksofplates said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
XS may not be complete, but isn't it the "most complete" of all options available?
what does that mean? most complete?
More complete than other options. What else comes with as many pieces as XS does, at least when XO is included?
KVM. Qemu and libvirt do pretty much everything. Qemu even does dirty bitmap for incremental backups.
Libvert is an API, though. That's like XS with XAPI. What does the GUI for a cluster look like with KVM and libvert?
That's still all bundled together like with KVM. You don't have XS without XAPI, so it's the same thing.
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@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
XS may not be complete, but isn't it the "most complete" of all options available?
what does that mean? most complete?
More complete than other options. What else comes with as many pieces as XS does, at least when XO is included?
You've still lost me. Hyper-V has everything that XS has. XO isn't part of XS, so sure while it is available for free, it still doesn't count as part of XS.
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@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
But if your use to windows tools I find it hard to believe one wouldn't love hyper-v and 9nine tools.
LOL this is what I hated about Hyper-V. The requirement to manage it like managing normal Windows servers, a dozen different tools, or a third party one. ESXi on the other hand was awesome, ONE app (vSphere) that had every single aspect to ESXi all in one place to mange it all. Just Fantastic.
I did have to remount the data store and it was painful because I didn't have a proper backup, I still made it work but wow I had some downtime. Had I spent more time getting used to XO I wouldn't have had the issue.
So were you really remounting a non damaged SR, or did you have to wipe a corrupt SR, then remount it and then restore you VMs to it?
When I do my entire infrastructure over, I'm going full XS+X0 with Windows Server Data Center 2012 to as of now, just 1 host with a minimum of 32 GB of RAM with RAID 10 Storage hopefully using 15K drives. I have to shoot for the moon because i'm part of a non profit. My storage needs are kinda paltry. at the moment 1-2 tb is almost more than enough for all my VMs and really I could get by with 1 TB. My actual file server is where I'm rethinking my strategy as I split my nas using iscci to handle some of FS requirements and instead will stop us using my for split storage (vms/shares) and let it just be for backup.
I'd skip those expensive 15K drives and just go all SSD. You can drop RAID 10 and go RAID 5 at that size with SSD.
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@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
XS may not be complete, but isn't it the "most complete" of all options available?
what does that mean? most complete?
More complete than other options. What else comes with as many pieces as XS does, at least when XO is included?
You've still lost me. Hyper-V has everything that XS has. XO isn't part of XS, so sure while it is available for free, it still doesn't count as part of XS.
Okay, then bundle it yourself and solve the problem
Open source is not like proprietary software. You can bundle it yourself. So we stated this above... XS refers to XS+XO as a bundle. So now it all comes together, problem solved. -
@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Reid-Cooper said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
XS may not be complete, but isn't it the "most complete" of all options available?
what does that mean? most complete?
More complete than other options. What else comes with as many pieces as XS does, at least when XO is included?
You've still lost me. Hyper-V has everything that XS has. XO isn't part of XS, so sure while it is available for free, it still doesn't count as part of XS.
THere is no XO equivalent for any other platform. So that's pretty important.
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@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
e expensive 15K drives and just go all SSD. You can drop RAID 10 and go RAID 5 at that size with SSD.
RAID5 and me won't ever be friends anymore. I had one RAID5 fail on me, its my current job. LoL. When I worked in Enterprise and our backup team had a RAID5 fail it took I believe close to a week to rebuild. Nah i'll pass
Only reason I say 15K is because there are too many remarks about NOT going with SSD in my use cases. I'm usually on dell hardware and to my understanding, me going to by prosumer grade ssd's from samsung won't eliminate that about 1-2 drives absolutely will fail. I'm just getting used to the idea of using pcie-ssd's and they look to be where everyone should be going when cost normalize.
For shits and giggles, my current Dell Power Edge T100 has a 4 SSD Setup with RAID 10, its not recommended though.
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@krisleslie Recommended by who?
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From Spiceworks, I have had numerous people tell me to kinda back away from RAID1/10 with my consumer/prosumer SSD drives. Only because IT WILL wear those drives out faster.
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In my case I'm a SMB/Non-Profit, so as much as I would love to go SSD for the server, its a harder pitch for me when I'm barely able to get the drives I need (at least 10k) already. I've learned to not go splurge on new servers at all and to trust vendors who do refurbished with warranty and extended warranties so it helps to keep cost down. That alone helps me out tremendously.
Spending time with Dell and HP and explaining our use case has been helpful too. I have some awesome program I hope will help us lead to lower purchase cost for Dell servers but it was only available through Tech Soup and I haven't placed an order yet. If that pans out well, then yea I cna probably afford ssd's.
Case and point, I still manage our fleet of workstations individually. I'm JUST NOW able to an affordable imaging solution like Smart Deploy for the first time.
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I will say this, it's not been easy, having to plan and replan for this year, and the next possible 3-5 years along with the political climate (because if the government shuts down, hell we sometimes don't know if we are allowed to operate), its very very hard to mak e decisions sometimes without some harsh consequences. Sure, fear can be involved. If I get the wrong hardware, software, service, vendor etc, then that weakens "what appears" to be my leadership for the program even though it shouldn't get to that point. Sometimes I'm the last person to know ANYTHING and/or disconnected from other business units sometimes intentionally.
Sometimes the lesser of my two evils works out for my benefit, sometimes it doesn't.
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@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
In my case I'm a SMB/Non-Profit, so as much as I would love to go SSD for the server, its a harder pitch for me when I'm barely able to get the drives I need (at least 10k) already. I've learned to not go splurge on new servers at all and to trust vendors who do refurbished with warranty and extended warranties so it helps to keep cost down. That alone helps me out tremendously.
But you mentioned buying 15K HDDs. Price wise, the fewer SSDs will probably cost around the same total price as you'd need for the 15K in RAID 10.
@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
e expensive 15K drives and just go all SSD. You can drop RAID 10 and go RAID 5 at that size with SSD.
RAID5 and me won't ever be friends anymore. I had one RAID5 fail on me, its my current job. LoL. When I worked in Enterprise and our backup team had a RAID5 fail it took I believe close to a week to rebuild. Nah i'll pass
What size was your array on that RAID 5? @scottalanmiller has presented the math that shows that a single drive failure means a near 100% failure of the entire array at something around 12 TB. It's not until you get to around 3 TB that it maybe makes sense considering the failure domain.
With SSDs though, you don't suffer the same failure potential as with HDD, plus the performance improvements in SSD significantly reduce the resilver window, bringing RAID 5 back into the fold, but only for SSDs. -
Spending time with Dell and HP and explaining our use case has been helpful too. I have some awesome program I hope will help us lead to lower purchase cost for Dell servers but it was only available through Tech Soup and I haven't placed an order yet. If that pans out well, then yea I cna probably afford ssd's.
I can't believe that @scottalanmiller hasn't chime in on this one yet. This is classic letting your vendor (sales) person sell you stuff. You haven't bought anything yet, so that's good.
One thing these forums would love to see is people like yourself come here first.. post what your goals are and get the community to make suggests.
The other thing this community would like to see if you have faster needs is for you to HIRE an IT pro (consulting company) who doesn't sell anything and what you're paying them for is their opinion on what you should buy for your situation. This person/company should sit down with you and find out what your goals are and really lead you in what they consider is the best direction, with no names toward specific hardware/software purchase (where possible). Once you have an understanding of where you want to go and why it's good, then you can start looking at purchases that work toward that goal.It's amazing to see so many posts on SW where someone says - I just bought this server, it has 6 drives - how should I set them up? RAID 5/6/10, etc. The answer to this is - how did you determine you needed 6 drives and not 8? Why are you buying anything unless you already know exactly how you're going to set it up?
