Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance
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@notverypunny I mean after looking around on the net I see what Scott is saying the better performance might actually be better with thick provisioning, but it's negligible when people run analytics on it vs thin. Like only a couple of %.
But I think I see what Scott is also saying that maybe one of the HDD's if possibly throwing errors or failing. I've already replaced 2 drives in 2 years.
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@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@scottalanmiller so what should I do?
Start by looking at the RAID controller and see if the space has been set up yet.
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@scottalanmiller on one of our servers it's properly done. One the other not so much. I'm going to get the dell engineer I originally worked with to fix the one that isn't working right. So when we use Dell's tool to look at the raid it shows the proper capacity expansion on one server. The other server doesn't show the increase.
When I go into Xen Center, it doesn't "dynamically" see the adjust space. So I see what you're saying I was hoping it would automagically be there, not the case. So how do I get it to add it?
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@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@scottalanmiller on one of our servers it's properly done. One the other not so much. I'm going to get the dell engineer I originally worked with to fix the one that isn't working right. So when we use Dell's tool to look at the raid it shows the proper capacity expansion on one server. The other server doesn't show the increase.
When I go into Xen Center, it doesn't "dynamically" see the adjust space. So I see what you're saying I was hoping it would automagically be there, not the case. So how do I get it to add it?
Use XAPI interface to create a new SR or go through the same process using XO and a gui.
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Create a new SR? Wouldn't that break something? I'm confident when adding a single or more hard drive to the SR. I'm not very confident when we talking about the RAID
it doesn't seem to make sense. -
@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
Create a new SR? Wouldn't that break something? I'm confident when adding a single or more hard drive to the SR. I'm not very confident when we talking about the RAID
it doesn't seem to make sense.You need to create a new SR or expand the existing one. It's a logical volume on top of the block device.
Since expanding a production LV is likely more risky, it's easier to just create a new storage repository on your block device.
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@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
Create a new SR? Wouldn't that break something? I'm confident when adding a single or more hard drive to the SR. I'm not very confident when we talking about the RAID
it doesn't seem to make sense.It's all making perfect sense. Thinking of RAID as a special case is confusing you.
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@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@scottalanmiller on one of our servers it's properly done. One the other not so much. I'm going to get the dell engineer I originally worked with to fix the one that isn't working right. So when we use Dell's tool to look at the raid it shows the proper capacity expansion on one server. The other server doesn't show the increase.
Oh, that would cause an issue if it didn't really expand.
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@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
When I go into Xen Center, it doesn't "dynamically" see the adjust space. So I see what you're saying I was hoping it would automagically be there, not the case. So how do I get it to add it?
First you have to add it in the LVM on the RAID controller after the RAID is expanded. THEN you can look at growing what XC sees.
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@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@notverypunny See I want to get on the latest and greatest release. I just want to avoid having to nuke everything.
I feel your pain, but in the interests of being able to sleep at night you might be better off moving your stuff and starting from scratch.
In your position I would have created a new virtual disk on the raid controller and added it as a new SR, mainly because I've never considered the option of expanding an existing volume, seems risky without any real benefit that I can see right off the bat.
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@notverypunny said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@notverypunny See I want to get on the latest and greatest release. I just want to avoid having to nuke everything.
I feel your pain, but in the interests of being able to sleep at night you might be better off moving your stuff and starting from scratch.
In your position I would have created a new virtual disk on the raid controller and added it as a new SR, mainly because I've never considered the option of expanding an existing volume, seems risky without any real benefit that I can see right off the bat.
This assumes you can just add more mountpoints to whatever VMs he's using. In some situations you simply want to grow the disk you're using, not add a whole new disk to the VM.
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@scottalanmiller said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
When I go into Xen Center, it doesn't "dynamically" see the adjust space. So I see what you're saying I was hoping it would automagically be there, not the case. So how do I get it to add it?
First you have to add it in the LVM on the RAID controller after the RAID is expanded. THEN you can look at growing what XC sees.
RAID controller - grow RAID 10 from 4 to 6 disks (or whatever new number you have)
RAID controller - Use LVM to grow the virtual disk the RAID controller presents to Xen Server
Xen Server - Use LVM to grow the SR to include the new space it sees now.
Xen Server - do whatever you need for the VMs to use the new space. -
@Dashrender said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@notverypunny said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@notverypunny See I want to get on the latest and greatest release. I just want to avoid having to nuke everything.
I feel your pain, but in the interests of being able to sleep at night you might be better off moving your stuff and starting from scratch.
In your position I would have created a new virtual disk on the raid controller and added it as a new SR, mainly because I've never considered the option of expanding an existing volume, seems risky without any real benefit that I can see right off the bat.
This assumes you can just add more mountpoints to whatever VMs he's using. In some situations you simply want to grow the disk you're using, not add a whole new disk to the VM.
You wouldn't need to add a new disk to the VM to add a vPBD to the hypervisor. You can have the VDI on any SR and "expand" another disks on the VM.
But that's besides the point.
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@DustinB3403 said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@Dashrender said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@notverypunny said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@notverypunny See I want to get on the latest and greatest release. I just want to avoid having to nuke everything.
I feel your pain, but in the interests of being able to sleep at night you might be better off moving your stuff and starting from scratch.
In your position I would have created a new virtual disk on the raid controller and added it as a new SR, mainly because I've never considered the option of expanding an existing volume, seems risky without any real benefit that I can see right off the bat.
This assumes you can just add more mountpoints to whatever VMs he's using. In some situations you simply want to grow the disk you're using, not add a whole new disk to the VM.
You wouldn't need to add a new disk to the VM to add a vPBD to the hypervisor. You can have the VDI on any SR and "expand" another disks on the VM.
But that's besides the point.
Grow across the SRs? OK cool.
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@Dashrender said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@DustinB3403 said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@Dashrender said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@notverypunny said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@notverypunny See I want to get on the latest and greatest release. I just want to avoid having to nuke everything.
I feel your pain, but in the interests of being able to sleep at night you might be better off moving your stuff and starting from scratch.
In your position I would have created a new virtual disk on the raid controller and added it as a new SR, mainly because I've never considered the option of expanding an existing volume, seems risky without any real benefit that I can see right off the bat.
This assumes you can just add more mountpoints to whatever VMs he's using. In some situations you simply want to grow the disk you're using, not add a whole new disk to the VM.
You wouldn't need to add a new disk to the VM to add a vPBD to the hypervisor. You can have the VDI on any SR and "expand" another disks on the VM.
But that's besides the point.
Grow across the SRs? OK cool.
Yeah, the VM doesn't know any different. Is it normal? Probably, considering the limitations of the file system. 2TB - 4GB per VDI.
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@DustinB3403 said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@Dashrender said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@DustinB3403 said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@Dashrender said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@notverypunny said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@notverypunny See I want to get on the latest and greatest release. I just want to avoid having to nuke everything.
I feel your pain, but in the interests of being able to sleep at night you might be better off moving your stuff and starting from scratch.
In your position I would have created a new virtual disk on the raid controller and added it as a new SR, mainly because I've never considered the option of expanding an existing volume, seems risky without any real benefit that I can see right off the bat.
This assumes you can just add more mountpoints to whatever VMs he's using. In some situations you simply want to grow the disk you're using, not add a whole new disk to the VM.
You wouldn't need to add a new disk to the VM to add a vPBD to the hypervisor. You can have the VDI on any SR and "expand" another disks on the VM.
But that's besides the point.
Grow across the SRs? OK cool.
Yeah, the VM doesn't know any different. Is it normal? Probably, considering the limitations of the file system. 2TB - 4GB per VDI.
4 GB?
VDI - I'm super rusty with my Xen Server speak - VDI is the disk file on the SR, right? They are limited to 4 GB?
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@Dashrender said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@DustinB3403 said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@Dashrender said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@DustinB3403 said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@Dashrender said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@notverypunny said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@notverypunny See I want to get on the latest and greatest release. I just want to avoid having to nuke everything.
I feel your pain, but in the interests of being able to sleep at night you might be better off moving your stuff and starting from scratch.
In your position I would have created a new virtual disk on the raid controller and added it as a new SR, mainly because I've never considered the option of expanding an existing volume, seems risky without any real benefit that I can see right off the bat.
This assumes you can just add more mountpoints to whatever VMs he's using. In some situations you simply want to grow the disk you're using, not add a whole new disk to the VM.
You wouldn't need to add a new disk to the VM to add a vPBD to the hypervisor. You can have the VDI on any SR and "expand" another disks on the VM.
But that's besides the point.
Grow across the SRs? OK cool.
Yeah, the VM doesn't know any different. Is it normal? Probably, considering the limitations of the file system. 2TB - 4GB per VDI.
4 GB?
VDI - I'm super rusty with my Xen Server speak - VDI is the disk file on the SR, right? They are limited to 4 GB?
No, its 2TB minus 4GBs so 1.96TB per VDI.
It's a FS limit that is actively being worked on by a lot of people because it's annoying.
(old documentation but relevant for what we're discussing)
https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/legacy-archive/downloads/xs-configuration-limits-6-2.pdf -
I actually question the reasoning behind upgrading a R710 server in the first place. It's just too old. It has Nehalem 5500/5600 series CPUs. That's 6 generations old Xeons. Back when 4-core and 6-core where highest core count. Great if you like to spend money on electricity and cooling, otherwise not so great.
It would have been better value for money to get something newer and move the VMs instead. And low budget is not an excuse really as you can get refurbished servers with warranty for low prices. Something like a R720 for instance or newer.
So put new disks in a new/refurbished server and move the VMs. When everything is up and running and looking good, just wipe the disks and ebay the old server.
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@Pete-S That would have very easily been a much cleaner approach to this. I don't know if there was some sort of budget constraint but, clean is always the best if possible.
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@DustinB3403 said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:
@Pete-S That would have very easily been a much cleaner approach to this. I don't know if there was some sort of budget constraint but, clean is always the best if possible.
Agreed. My thoughts are:
- If you have no budget then do nothing
- If you have a small budget then make sure you get the most value for the little money you have
- If you don't have enough budget to get a good return on your investment then wait until you do
Some cost saving measures are just too expensive if you look at the total cost and what you get in return. More so for a non-profit that has to use each dollar wisely.
