BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer

BRRABill

I found it interesting that XS stores the virtual hard drives in VHD format.

Opens right up in Hyper-V/Windows.

BRRABill

yeah I'm not surprised.. you can do the same with SQL and Exchange DBs, though it normally (if not completely) requires taking those systems offline.

Yeah the system/VHD definitely has to be offline.

BRRABill

I have decided to give XenServer a try in the production environment.

I installed it for reals on our new server.

Had another install question...
If you have more than one partition and select both, it says it will span the storage repository across them. Is that ever a good idea?

In my situation here, I have a SSD array and a SATA array, so I assume spanning them would be a terrible idea.

Dashrender

huh... what is the plan for the two different arrays?

BRRABill

@Dashrender

Well, as of now, unknown.

The SSD is more than I need. I might just end up not using the SATA array.

My thought was use it for storage for backups and stuff, but that probably would be best done on another machine.

But, I was just curious as to that option.

BRRABill

Another question:

When you do a fresh install, and there are, say 20 updates available, with a service pack being the last one...can you just install the service pack? Or do you need to install all the updates up to the service pack?

BRRABill

This article seems to say the SP includes all previous updates.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX142355

Just want to be 100% sure.

Dashrender

Nope.. some include some older ones.. but not all.

You can start with the newest and work backwards, refreshing the list of needed updates each time.

BRRABill

@Dashrender said:

Nope.. some include some older ones.. but not all.

You can start with the newest and work backwards, refreshing the list of needed updates each time.

Sorry, I did not ask a complete question.

I meant to ask can you just install the SP to cover all the updates previous to that.

Which I think from the link I posted and what you said will be OK.

BRRABill

Another question...

Somewhere in the middle of updates, I started getting the following error.

My first question is:
before this error .. where was the updating "migrating" the VM to?

And the second questions is ... why did it stop? Out of disk space or something?

BRRABill

Well, everything was going OK until I tried making a new pool tonight.

Then my server stopped responding.

So, that is that until I go into the office tomorrow.

BRRABill

NOTE TO SELF:
should probably start using iDRAC with this new system

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said:

NOTE TO SELF:
should probably start using iDRAC with this new system

Yes, out of band management is a really, really big deal.

BRRABill

@BRRABill said:

Well, everything was going OK until I tried making a new pool tonight.

Then my server stopped responding.

So, that is that until I go into the office tomorrow.

Turns out somehow I powered the machine down.

Still, a sign from above to get iDRAC up and running.

BRRABill

Something else I found today, that could use some explaining when someone has time...

I added a server to a pool. But it turns out that if you remove a server from a pool, it deletes all the local storage. What is the reasoning behind that?

DustinB3403

So you have 2 servers in a Xen Pool, and if you remove one, it wipes the pool?

Without looking into it to much it sounds just like shared storage, and for a single host to know what it has it has to clear the storage and rescan it.

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said:

I added a server to a pool. But it turns out that if you remove a server from a pool, it deletes all the local storage. What is the reasoning behind that?

It's a decom process, they automate that step as the assumption is that the device is being scrapped. I'm not sure that I agree with the automation, but there is logic behind it.

Why are you removing systems from the pool if you want them to maintain their local storage?

scottalanmiller

@DustinB3403 said:

So you have 2 servers in a Xen Pool, and if you remove one, it wipes the pool?

No, it only wipes local.

scottalanmiller

The idea is that anything that got put onto a machine in a pool belongs to the pool, not the machine. If a machine is removed from a pool it should not get to take pool data with it when it goes. It's a security mechanism.

BRRABill

@scottalanmiller

I moved it into a pool last night when I was playing around with my TWO XS boxes. (TWO now! Though one is just my test box.)

I had this idea, that I could move my XO install from the test machine to the production machine. But in XC, there is no move option, just migrate, and the new XS server I set up is not an option.

So I thought, maybe the VM needs to be off, which does give a MOVE option, but it still does not list the new XS.

So I thought (without reading or asking ... always dumb) that perhaps they needed to be in a pool. And that's how I got where I got.

Can you move a VM from one standalone XS to another?