@BRRABill said in BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer:

You know, this might belong in its own thread, but...

I know it's a terrible idea to restore a DC. Always better to reinstall and promote.

But what about moving one from one XS to another?

I'm so happy in the Linux world. Not trolling about MS products, just facts about fragile some windows VMs can be when there is a problem.

My clients experiencing the VDI corrupt stuff:

• 3 Windows VMs, all corrupted
• 6 Linux VMs, some with database or web server: no problem

Can be a complete random (very small number to draw any conclusion), but still. That's very common.

@BRRABill well, not in my world (more corporate world than lab env). In average, there is more SR lost or problems which need to restore entirely a VM. And if you are in a pool, losing one host completely is just a non-event.

@BRRABill That's far from being the usual case. But it could happen, in this case yes it would be faster to only restore metadata.

VM metadata means: VM name, description, number of virtual interfaces, disks etc. Everything except the disk content.

So when we are doing VM backup, we are actually export both disk content and VM metadata.

Otherwise, it would be just a bunch of disks with their UUID, which is a bit useless when you need to restore (unless you can memorize every VM configuration and disk placement with their respective UUID. In this case, please answer the question on the meaning on life and everything).

@DustinB3403 I'm not sure to understand the question. First, which backup type are you talking?

@Danp Thanks. If you have any log, feel free to share

Via which view exactly? Keep me posted about logs

Nah, no problem to apply it. This is a special one, but even if you already triggered the issue (in a kind of special way, I know I spent a week helping a client), it won't change anything. Tested and applied/verified on 20 different hosts and 2 with the actual issue. No problem.

Let's see in more details:

• we fetch here the update list: http://updates.xensource.com/XenServer/updates.xml
• told ya: after-apply-guidance="restartHost" (so nothing special about suspended VMs)
• but guidance-mandatory="true" -> this is a new field since XS 7. I hope they won't ask for it for nothing. We'll find a way to get this into the patching process (probably asking for restarting after updating completely the host)

So doesn't change to apply with XC or XO if you follow the guidance (manually in XO so far).

edit: remember to think an update like a Linux update. Not a windows update. Thanks.

@BRRABill The thing is, I'm not a Windows expert. I'll take a look at this.

@BRRABill A lot of XS noobs seems lost with that, and the official doc is not very great.

@JaredBusch XenServer wasn't designed for home usage, but for companies which already have plenty of shares (NFS/SMB). It explains why it's not meant like this "in a easy way".

But it will work with a local ISO storage, it's just not really user friendly.

I'm currently writing a complete guide/blog post on Xen tools.

@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:

@coliver said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:

@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:

@dafyre said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:

@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:

Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?

I think the general consensus is to start with one core and add more if performance sucks.

Virtual?

Always! You should have a reason to be physical otherwise virtual.

Just for my own knowledge, what would be a good reason to go physical? Just for a point of reference.

Maybe NAS/SAN storage, where massive I/Os and scalability is needed (note that you can connect a massive SAN/NAS to a pool so...).

Also, even real-time operations could be done with an Hypervisor now (Xen is going at full speed in automotive industry, via XenRT and Xen ARM projects).

@BRRABill said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:

@olivier said

That's a way to do it also yes. In general, I've got always a physical machine (eg for backup) with enough space to do that. Doesn't require much bandwidth and power to simply share ISOs.

Yeah, just giving options.

There are many.

Anything that can share files would work. I just find sharing files anonymously through Windows maddening.

I have no idea, last time I tried it was 10 years ago.

@BRRABill said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:

My new take on XS is to not touch XS. It's like Fight Club.

The easy way for ISOs I found was...

a) set up a new Linux Mint VM
b) set up an anonymous share
c) add ISOs
d) done

Windows works, but it;s hard to do anonymous shares, I've always found. You could create a user, which I did initially, but I've since moved to a small Mint instance and haven't looked back.

That's a way to do it also yes. In general, I've got always a physical machine (eg for backup) with enough space to do that. Doesn't require much bandwidth and power to simply share ISOs.

@Francesco-Provino said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:

@olivier or via cloudinit, exactly, I just forgot to add it.

The thing is we already have CloudInit support, so it would be a shame to not using it

@Francesco-Provino Solution is creating a template with CloudInit process, then Xen Orchestra can do the rest. See https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/full-cloudinit-power-in-xenserver/

That sound really overcomplicated to serve just some ISOs. I wonder if I won't offer a "public" NFS in read only with most popular ISO, a kind of ISO as a service

@wirestyle22 If you made the wget with root, no problem, XAPI is running as root too (and default perms in here should be OK). So after you Wget is done, just ls to be sure your ISO is here. Then, rescan the SR with the appropriate interface (Xen Orchestra or XenCenter).

@wirestyle22 You need to rescan the SR to find freshly downloaded ISOs.

edit: local share are not officially supported by Citrix, so you can do it but if you can use a NFS/SMB share somewhere, that's even better