Best posts made by olivier

I have file level restore on top right now

SMB share are not mounted in the system, we are talking directly to the share in Javascript using SMB protocol.

About the OP, I don't understand what is the issue.I need more input to understand why you "can't add a SMB share"

Hey there,

If anyone can make some quick benchmark if you have any Windows based VM: using Crystal Disk Mark (latest, 5.2 I think) with the default parameters (5/1GiB)

Done tests on Windows Server 2016 (TP5, yeah I know I'm late) and I would like to compare how much I can lose in a hyperconverged scenario.

Also, telling the SR type and the physical device underneath would be great Thanks!

edit: no worries, I'm not here to compare apples to apples, just want a quick order of magnitude.

@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

@DustinB3403 said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

@Carnival-Boy I must've missed that part.

But still the justification of cost for such a tiny deployment of a single host and 2 VM's to have to pay even the $500 seems insane.

Why do you need the Backup API's for 2 VM's. Just use in guest agent backup tools (Unitrends, ShadowProtect). There are backup options for ESXi Free (Trilliad, and GhettoVCB).

The backup API's (CBT/VADP) are only valuable at scale, and given that Hyper-V hasn't had a CBT API Until 2016 (which isn't wildly supported yet by backup products) Arguing that you NEED essentials license to get a comparable functionality isn't actually true. Xen doesn't have a CBT based backup API (Doing external backups still requires doing a full read). XO does have a non-application consistent forever reverse incremental snapshot system, but that's still going to require a full read of IO for synthetic roll ups, and the lack of application consistency makes it un-usable for transnational workloads.

For some reason everyone on SW and ML seems to think that the Backup API's are CRITICAL when your talking about a tiny SMB (they aren't) and ignores their value at scale (Where they are critical to reducing backup windows by 95%). I've never really understood this...

I'm not sure to understand if you understand (^^) XO delta backup.

1. We are using quiesce snapshots by default (if the VM support it, it will be consistent on VM level).
2. What do you mean about "require a full read of IO for synthetic roll ups"? We are exporting only the changed blocks between 2 snapshots (therefore, generating a small VHD file). Then, the oldest delta VHD will be merged into the full VHD, on the remote storage (so without the XenServer assistance).
3. We don't have any report of issues in restore even for DBs.

edit: you are a vendor from which company?

@John-Nicholson said in Why is VMWare considered so often:

Years ago, I had a DRDB cluster go split brain on me

This, totally agree. Before adopting a product in a real prod env, you have 2 choices:

1. pay for a turnkey solution (packaged with support)
2. install it by yourself ONLY after having enough knowledge on how it works.

As you said earlier, you can't master something in 4h. You need to practice, validate, crash it, restore it etc.

@John-Nicholson I think you are mixing Xen and XenServer here.

So you edited your post and now I don't agree with you

You can have support for XS and also support for XO (our pricing model is based on a dedicated appliance + support).

Anyway, my point was:

• Free software is great and powerful, you just trade this against time to understand how it works (or cross your fingers, but it's not acceptable in production). Note that you could mitigate the risk in different ways but you should understand most of your infrastructure.

• Support/Service on proprietary software can be useful if you have money and you don't care about what's happening here (ie not your core business)

• Support/Service on Open Source software is a kind of best of both worlds.

But that's my opinion

@John-Nicholson I'm not here to attack the product at all (I don't even know what half of the acronyms meant). I'm not building an hypervisor.

I'm just here to try to survive with the crumbs left from server virt market, without leaving my philosophy (making Free software).

There is a middle ground between everything known and using proprietary software everywhere.

Some people consider this is a philosophical debate, some don't.

My point of view is transparency is the key, value is in the service/experience, not the (closed) code itself. At least, this is how it evolves (see the proportion of OSS in companies 15 y ago vs now).

/my 2 cents

@black3dynamite I can't use LVM because it's block-based. I can only work with file level backend.

I did try to play with blocks, performance was also correct (a new layer so a small extra overhead). But I got a big issue in certain cases. Also, it was less scalable in "more than 3" hosts scenario.

This is currently a large amount of work (therefore cost for us) to be able to read VHD files (explaining it will be in Premium version of XOA) and do all the needed stuff on top. But I hope we'll be on time!

@John-Nicholson This is something you can do easily on your NFS/SMB remote (eg with ZFS), and because it will be handled transparently at the FS level, no problem with XO.

Note this opinion is on XS + XO from the sources. If you pay for the turnkey version (appliance + updater + support) this comment is not relevant.

@DustinB3403 You need to think globally Only 1 Premium is enough to not have to convince 7x Starter. And costing 7 times less in support.

You should see Starter as "introductory offer". We'll add services step by step (like Cloud Backup).

@matthewaroth35 said in Setup 3 node cluster:

Is XEN Orchestra free?

English is a bit vague for the word "free".

It's Open Source. We sell a turnkey appliance + support + web updater. If you want to play with it from the sources, you can

@matthewaroth35 Nope. XOA can be connect to any number of hosts at the same time. Just run it somewhere, it enough. See https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/architecture.html

It's available in XOA Free, so you can test it without restrictions

It's completely free and easy to use XOSAN deployement process is complex, rely on various bricks and linked to xen-orchesra.com, so that would have require a lot of effort to make it available directly from the sources in a usable way.

But if you want to do it yourself, it's also possible:

1. create a VM in each host of your pool you want to have in the cluster
2. install gluster server in each, create the cluster
3. install gluster client in XS
4. modify the file SM driver into XenServer to fit with Gluster
5. restart the toolstack
6. mount it

This way, you could also bench it

@dustinb3403 It won't be XOSAN to the community. XOSAN is like XOA, a turnkey packaged solution.

You'll be able to mount a gluster volume when we'll open the Gluster driver (which allows to create a SR of Gluster type in short). Then you can do whatever you want with that, but you'll need to monitor it yourself, and understand how Gluster works. Something you won't require by using XOSAN

Also a trial version of XOSAN will be available for people who want to test it and bench it quickly (literally in few clicks)