BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer

olivier

Yes, as @Danp said, there is always a pool: a "single" host is by default in a pool with no name label.

XenCenter choose to hide this, not us.

BRRABill

Thanks @Danp ... I think the thing that was throwing us here (who thought it was not possible outside a pool) was that a standalone is actually a pool

BRRABill

Converted my first physical server to a production XS this morning.

So far, so good.

BRRABill

Question:

On the new production server, it is not reporting the space taken by my new VM.

This is what is says:

Total: 871.8 GiB
Currently used: 5.2 GiB
Available: 866.5 GiB

But for example the new VM I migrated over has at least 100GB.

Why would it not be reporting this?

BRRABill

Danp

Thin provisioning?

BRRABill

@Danp said:

Thin provisioning?

But there is 100GB of data actually on the drive.

Dashrender

you have to refresh. Refresh doesn't happen automatically.

BRRABill

@Dashrender said:

you have to refresh. Refresh doesn't happen automatically.

Ah.

What is this? 1973?

Dashrender

@BRRABill said:

@Dashrender said:

you have to refresh. Refresh doesn't happen automatically.

Ah.

What is this? 1973?

I kinda asked/thought the same thing. Having to manually fresh, or relaunch the application just seems odd.

BRRABill

@Dashrender said:

I kinda asked/thought the same thing. Having to manually fresh, or relaunch the application just seems ~~odd~~ OLD.

FTFY

Dashrender

Did refreshing it solve the problem?

BRRABill

Yep.

Rescan is actually the word they use.

What does that do exactly, I wonder?

BRRABill

@Dashrender said:

Did refreshing it solve the problem?

Did you ever do this through XC?

I could not find the option there.

scottalanmiller

Am I clear... the issue is that XO only refreshes the data as to drive sizes on a page refresh?

BRRABill

@scottalanmiller said:

Am I clear... the issue is that XO only refreshes the data as to drive sizes on a page refresh?

No you have to click the "rescan" button or it never does it. At least that is what I am seeing.

BRRABill

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Am I clear... the issue is that XO only refreshes the data as to drive sizes on a page refresh?

No you have to click the "rescan" button or it never does it. At least that is what I am seeing.

Ah okay, my guess is because they don't want to incur a storage penalty without everyone being clear that they are about to query the storage. In a small lab with local storage this seems silly, but if this was a massive environment with tons of heavily used remote storage, might be something that you want to carefully control. What if you had a hundred admins with XO open all of the time and a thousand nodes on it with gobs of shared storage all updating automatically... suddenly what seems like a trivial hit becomes crippling.

BRRABill

@scottalanmiller said:

@BRRABill said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Am I clear... the issue is that XO only refreshes the data as to drive sizes on a page refresh?

No you have to click the "rescan" button or it never does it. At least that is what I am seeing.

Ah okay, my guess is because they don't want to incur a storage penalty without everyone being clear that they are about to query the storage. In a small lab with local storage this seems silly, but if this was a massive environment with tons of heavily used remote storage, might be something that you want to carefully control. What if you had a hundred admins with XO open all of the time and a thousand nodes on it with gobs of shared storage all updating automatically... suddenly what seems like a trivial hit becomes crippling.

And, again, in a larger environment, seeing storage space in the GUI here is not really the proper way to manage it, correct?

scottalanmiller

@BRRABill said:

And, again, in a larger environment, seeing storage space in the GUI here is not really the proper way to manage it, correct?

Oh I don't know about that, no matter how big the environment is, the virtualization platform administrators are going to need a view into what is going on, at least from their perspective. In a really, REALLY large environment you would be on fully independent shared storage in 99% of cases (think EMC VMAX) with a totally independent storage management team and they would deal with performance, capacity, growth, monitoring, etc. But even then the platform team would need some visibility into what they were using of that storage. So I would expect that XO having that view would remain important, but for slightly curtailed reasons.