I agree with you in general terms; but, for example, what about the ESXi hosts? If I add them to the vCenter using FQDN, I will completely rely on the DNS servers, that are both running in Windows VM that rely… on the ESXi hosts! In case of complete reboot or full power loss of the infrastructure, they will have to wait the DNS to come before being added to the vCenter. There is something that does not convince me…
Posts made by Francesco Provino
-
RE: Subnet migration best practices
-
Subnet migration best practices
I have to migrate a whole vmware-based environment (vcenter, mani esxi hosts) with AD domain that also host DNS and dhcp to a new and bigger subnet. Today everything is on 192.168.0.0/24 (old consumer router bad habit), I want to move all to something like 10.45.1.0/22 (so, over 1k usable IPs). I can put the whole environment down for a couple of hours at maximum. It's mainly windows-based and everything authenticate through AD.
There's also a VMware Horizon (ex View) client pool, with two connection servers.Now, I have some doubts on the best practices to follow regarding this migration, for example, how to change the vCenter subnet without losing the Horizon functionality? Should I reconfigure everything in a DNS-based fashion? What about the DCs (there are two in production)?
-
RE: Thin provisioning in XS7
Ok, using the ext type of storage the thin provisioning works without an issue; thanks to everybody for the answers!
-
RE: Thin provisioning in XS7
@scottalanmiller said in Thin provisioning in XS7:
@Francesco-Provino said in Thin provisioning in XS7:
@scottalanmiller said in Thin provisioning in XS7:
@Francesco-Provino said in Thin provisioning in XS7:
@BRRABill said in Thin provisioning in XS7:
Here's a link to the whole article.
http://techblog.danielpellarini.com/sysadmin/how-to-enable-thin-provisioning-on-xenserver/
So, nothing has changed in XS7 about thin provisioning… sadly, a plain KVM or XEN (so, the full Linux storage backend) is way ahead in flexibility, with thin-lvm, external and internal qcow (or raw) snapshot, etc.
Yes, and will likely always remain so. Xen has always been vastly more powerful and flexible than XenServer, but lacks the distro model. XenServer is about making it packaged and easy.
Uhm, I haven't found XS7 any easier than a plain linux distro until now, Its only big advantage is the great API that provide a nice and encapsulated method to backup VMs. But IMHO is both harder and less powerful than libvirt (with both Xen and KVM).
have you played with XenOrchestra?
Not yet, but in truth I really prefer a solid CLI and documentation to another fancy GUI…
-
RE: Thin provisioning in XS7
@scottalanmiller said in Thin provisioning in XS7:
@Francesco-Provino said in Thin provisioning in XS7:
@BRRABill said in Thin provisioning in XS7:
Here's a link to the whole article.
http://techblog.danielpellarini.com/sysadmin/how-to-enable-thin-provisioning-on-xenserver/
So, nothing has changed in XS7 about thin provisioning… sadly, a plain KVM or XEN (so, the full Linux storage backend) is way ahead in flexibility, with thin-lvm, external and internal qcow (or raw) snapshot, etc.
Yes, and will likely always remain so. Xen has always been vastly more powerful and flexible than XenServer, but lacks the distro model. XenServer is about making it packaged and easy.
Uhm, I haven't found XS7 any easier than a plain linux distro until now, Its only big advantage is the great API that provide a nice and encapsulated method to backup VMs. But IMHO is both harder and less powerful than libvirt (with both Xen and KVM).
-
RE: Thin provisioning in XS7
@BRRABill said in Thin provisioning in XS7:
Here's a link to the whole article.
http://techblog.danielpellarini.com/sysadmin/how-to-enable-thin-provisioning-on-xenserver/
So, nothing has changed in XS7 about thin provisioning… sadly, a plain KVM or XEN (so, the full Linux storage backend) is way ahead in flexibility, with thin-lvm, external and internal qcow (or raw) snapshot, etc.
-
RE: Thin provisioning in XS7
@scottalanmiller said in Thin provisioning in XS7:
Yes, you are thinking of LVM as "what's on top" but you can't use LVM, it's just an abstraction layer in the middle. It replaces the partitioning layer. So LVM instead of MBR, for example.
LVM is what provides abilities like thin provisioning, snapshots and resizing. Without LVM, you can't have those. LVM sits on top of the final block devices as presented to the OS. Then the filesystem (EXT3 in this case) goes onto the logical volume(s) created by LVM.
You can't use LVM directly, just like you can't use a partition directly.
So if you look at the block device (drive) and ask what is on it, it seems LVM. If you look from the top down you look at the filesystem (EXT3.) If you look at the stack, LVM is the piece in the middle. EXT3 is on LVM, LVM is on the RAID array.
This is perfectly clear to me, I'm a Linux sysadmin. But I still don't get how to get a thin provisioned LOCAL SR on XS, LVM-based.
-
Thin provisioning in XS7
I've heard that XS7 support thin provisioning storage also for local SR; does anyone know how to enable it?
By now, I stick to thick-LVM SR… -
RE: How to install XenServer 7 in GUI-less mode?
Thanks @scottalanmiller . That's ugly, I'm sure I can install CentOS and other distros without needing a KVM… I've done that several times in some of my KVM (hypervisor) machines.
I was thinking that because the XS installer is based on the CentOS one, it would also carry a GUI-less installation method.
-
How to install XenServer 7 in GUI-less mode?
I want to install XS7 in a server (Fujitsu) on which I just got the serial-over-lan access (no KVM in here, waste of money, I fully agree with that), but the XS7 installer automatically go into "GUI install" mode after the boot… no Grub or other bootloader menu are shown, and the start of the GUI automatically stop the data flow into the serial interface.
Is there a way to install XS7 in a completely GUI-less way? Thanks in advance!
-
RE: How to (correctly!) mount a LOCAL ISO repo in XS7?
@stacksofplates said in How to (correctly!) mount a LOCAL ISO repo in XS7?:
@scottalanmiller said in How to (correctly!) mount a LOCAL ISO repo in XS7?:
The problem here is that the standard tools for doing this assume that the ISO repo will be remote, not local. If you want a local one, you are stuck without using the XenCenter tools. Not sure if XenOrchestra will allow for this in an automated way, have not looked into that and don't have one at the ready right at the moment. Maybe @DustinB3403 knows?
XO does. You can just create a local repo the same as a remote repo. However, I've never had to go through the issues explained here. I just used the cli to create a local repo and it showed up in XenCenter. I didn't need to mount anything afterwards.
@stacksofplates how do you exactly mount (permanently!) the ISO filesystem? I have tried to mount every combination of ext3/xfs and lvm volume/standard partition in /etc/fstab with common options, but every time XS7 stuck on boot and go in maintenance mode. Of course, the problem appears only when the host is rebooted...
-
RE: How to (correctly!) mount a LOCAL ISO repo in XS7?
@travisdh1 my storage is just an mdadm raid 10, so how can I create an LVM-based ISO repo with XenCenter? Maybe I missed that option…
-
How to (correctly!) mount a LOCAL ISO repo in XS7?
Every time I reboot the host after the configuration of a local ISO SR (in a mounted filesystem, XFS) I got the "mantainance mode" in startup…
I've created the ISO SR withxe sr-create type=iso device-config:legacy_mode=true
device-config:location=/path/to/mntpointand after that I mount the LVM logical volume (formatted in XFS) in /path/to/mntpoint, so I copied the appropriate row from /etc/mtab to /etc/fstab… standard procedure with Linux, really a mess with XS7!
The host would not start until I remove that row from /etc/fstab.
Is there a better way to mount the ISO SR in XS7 than doing it manually after startup?
@scottalanmiller -
RE: New KVM recommendation
@scottalanmiller, any example of those cards? This solution looks very interesting for workstation also!
-
RE: XenServer 7 has launched!
@scottalanmiller said in XenServer 7 has launched!:
Check your DNS.
It seems to me that it's working…
[root@localhost ~]# ping google.it
PING google.it (216.58.198.35) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from mil04s04-in-f3.1e100.net (216.58.198.35): icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=69.4 ms
@scottalanmiller, have you try to use yum on any new XS7 installation? Try it yourself, I think that there's something wrong with the default setup… -
RE: XenServer 7 has launched!
@scottalanmiller said in XenServer 7 has launched!:
It is telling you that the repo failed. Either your repo data is wrong or the repo has gone down.
Ehm… it's the standard CentOS 7 base repo!
This one:[base]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Base
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=os&infra=$infra
enabled=1
exclude=kernel kernel-abi-whitelists kernel-debug kernel-debug-devel kernel-devel kernel-doc kernel-tools kernel-tools-libs kernel-tools-libs-devel linux-firmware biosdevname centos-release systemd* stunnel kexec-tools ocaml*
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7And of course it's working on a standard CentOS 7!
-
RE: XenServer 7 has launched!
So… why can't I use yum to install packages? I've enable the repos, but yum told me that
One of the configured repositories failed (Sconosciuto), and yum doesn't have enough cached data to continue. At this point the only safe thing yum can do is fail. There are a few ways to work "fix" this: 1. Contact the upstream for the repository and get them to fix the problem. 2. Reconfigure the baseurl/etc. for the repository, to point to a working upstream. This is most often useful if you are using a newer distribution release than is supported by the repository (and the packages for the previous distribution release still work). 3. Disable the repository, so yum won't use it by default. Yum will then just ignore the repository until you permanently enable it again or use --enablerepo for temporary usage: yum-config-manager --disable <repoid> 4. Configure the failing repository to be skipped, if it is unavailable. Note that yum will try to contact the repo. when it runs most commands, so will have to try and fail each time (and thus. yum will be be much slower). If it is a very temporary problem though, this is often a nice compromise: yum-config-manager --save --setopt=<repoid>.skip_if_unavailable=true Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: base/7-2.1511.el7.centos.2.10/x86_64
Any idea about that?
-
RE: IBM Storage V3700
I manage a Storwoze 3700, you can find the option for easy tiering is in the web interface, I think is in the "settings" menu (the last voice on the right column).