SAN LUNs Do Not Act Like NAS Shares
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Why does the XenMotion approach not work?
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I have no experience with XenMotion?
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@ntoxicator said:
I have no experience with XenMotion?
That's realistically the only tool to be looking at here. It will "just do what you want." It will move the storage over, while everything is running, without downtime or extra tools.
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XenMotion is paid product / support. Again right now we're using XenServer Free edition.
Great it can move the storage disk over while its running. However, users are constantly writing data to it as its an SMB Share from Windows Domain controller
Folders are on this drive "data disk" and windows domain controller handles the folder shares & file permissions.
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@ntoxicator said:
XenMotion is paid product / support. Again right now we're using XenServer Free edition.
XenMotion is available in XenServer... I can do it in my home lab without any issues.
Check out the wiki link I posted earlier.
https://wiki.xenserver.org/index.php?title=Storage_XenMotion
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@ntoxicator said:
Great it can move the storage disk over while its running. However, users are constantly writing data to it as its an SMB Share from Windows Domain controller
Folders are on this drive "data disk" and windows domain controller handles the folder shares & file permissions.
That's the point... it was literally designed for this.
It writes all new changes to the new location and merges the unchanged data into the new location. You won't risk downtime or losing writes with this technology.
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@ntoxicator said:
XenMotion is paid product / support. Again right now we're using XenServer Free edition.
I know nothing of the non-free version. I would never buy that or recommend a paid version. XenMotion is free.
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@ntoxicator said:
Great it can move the storage disk over while its running. However, users are constantly writing data to it as its an SMB Share from Windows Domain controller
That is exactly what XenMotion is for. If users were not writing to it, you would have no need for XenMotion, you could just copy.
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Thank you. I will look into it?? As Within XenCenter, I click the XenServer node and the disk attached and when I click "move" it throws me an error.
however, when the VM is shut down - i can move the disk without problem..
Its just concerning that its a Windows Server domain, with shares. How would it still be able to write the data to the new Storage Repository and put it back together and be fine? meh
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@scottalanmiller said:
XenMotion
Article I found
https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2012/08/24/storage_xenmotion/ -
@ntoxicator said:
Thank you. I will look into it?? As Within XenCenter, I click the XenServer node and the disk attached and when I click "move" it throws me an error.
however, when the VM is shut down - i can move the disk without problem..
Its just concerning that its a Windows Server domain, with shares. How would it still be able to write the data to the new Storage Repository and put it back together and be fine? meh
It's all block data. It doesn't really care what is sitting on top of it. What version of XenServer are you running?
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@ntoxicator said:
@scottalanmiller said:
XenMotion
Article I found
https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2012/08/24/storage_xenmotion/2012... back when it was a Citrix product. We mean XenMotion now, not then
Citrix donated the entire XenServer project to Linux Foundation since 2012. -
@scottalanmiller said:
@ntoxicator said:
@scottalanmiller said:
XenMotion
Article I found
https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2012/08/24/storage_xenmotion/2012... back when it was a Citrix product. We mean XenMotion now, not then
Citrix donated the entire XenServer project to Linux Foundation since 2012.This information, or rather the lack of knowing it, has been the cause for countless misunderstandings in the hypervisor world!
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Same with any products, really. Outdated information whether by time or product version is always confusing. Things change over time. 2012 is a generation ago in IT time.
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Great info... I've been using Citrix XenServer since around 2012. The Free version. Had the Enterprise version with HA and other features in the small datacenter I helped manage. it was $$$$$$$$$$$$$ along with using Citrix XenApp $$$$$$$
Probably why I had the bad taste in my mouth.. better feeling now they passed it to Linux foundation.
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For most of a decade, people tried to promote KVM as open source because Xen wasn't exactly open for the first couples years back in like 2003. That legacy lasted for something like five times the length of the software actually not being open. Once someone had written it down, everyone just kept repeating it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
For most of a decade, people tried to promote KVM as open source because Xen wasn't exactly open for the first couples years back in like 2003. That legacy lasted for something like five times the length of the software actually not being open. Once someone had written it down, everyone just kept repeating it.
This is like trying to kill off RAID 5.
And now that RAID 5 is viable again with SSDs, we're in even a worst state of what is happening
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@ntoxicator said:
Probably why I had the bad taste in my mouth.. better feeling now they passed it to Linux foundation.
Oh yeah, back in 2012 we recommended XCP, not XenServer, for exactly these reasons. XCP was the reference open source, free distro of Xen then. But since that time XenServer was donated to Linux Foundation just as Xen was. So now all three are from the LF and XCP and XS have been merged into a single product.
Xen has always been really awesome. And there have always been a few good distros of it. XenServer only recently became a good one, it was total garbage before the LF took it over and merged it with XCP.
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So what you're saying is.... I should definately upgrade a node to 6.5!? lol.
next weekend I'm just going to schedule downtime and upgrade this one node to XenServer 6.1 (From 6.0)
Just read more information on site and realized that the LACP bond is not 100% true and working as was not fully supported until 6.1
I had previous nodes running 6.1 and those appeared to have less 'issues' and also seemed faster.
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@ntoxicator said:
So what you're saying is.... I should definately upgrade a node to 6.5!? lol.
next weekend I'm just going to schedule downtime and upgrade this one node to XenServer 6.1 (From 6.0)
Just read more information on site and realized that the LACP bond is not 100% true and working as was not fully supported until 6.1
I had previous nodes running 6.1 and those appeared to have less 'issues' and also seemed faster.
6.2 was the first LF version, I think. You need to update to atleast that. If not go the entire way to 6.5 just make sure you have decent backups.
