XenServer

XenServer 5.5 Announced

Wednesday, 06 May 2009 20:57 XenPro

XenServer 5.5, also known as Project George, was released today at Citrix Synergy.

From what I can see Citrix have been busy working with Storage and Backup partners to integrate Xen into their products and vice versa, which is a good move. Storage and VM cloning/backup has always been lacking from the previous versions, so this really moves things forward.

More intersting is the inlcusion of Dynamic Workload Balancing, which is something I asked for a while back, so it's good to see that in there. This allows VMs to be moved around XenServer hosts based on user-definable policies, e.g. high CPU usage, which has obvious advantages for all kinds of scenarios.

For more information visit Citrix.

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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 06 May 2009 21:14 )

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Updated: XenServer Wobbles

Thursday, 16 October 2008 19:19 XenPro

Following on from previous posts on XenServer 5 issues, I've dug a little deeper...

Looking at my servers via the command line (xsconsole) I noticed some of them were saying their NICs were disconnected and the Make/Model was unknown, as before except XenConsole was now showing the opposite, i.e. everything was ok?!?

I decided to put the servers into Maintenance Mode and Reboot them, which resulted in the servers then becoming uncontactable!!!!

So I had to visit the Console to see what had happened only to find the NICs had disappeared, never to be seen again! The only way I could think to fix it (quickly) was to reinstall Xen, which pleasingly took all of 10 minutes.

There are other issues though, like the fact that intermittantly the Netmask and Gateway settings simply disappear, as do the ntp settings except they are sometimes replaced with other settings.

I'm pretty sure this is all to do with driver incompatability, but if you look on the Citrix forums you'll see it's not limited to any particular Make/Model of server or even NIC. Also these issues didn't seem to happen on 4.1, which points to a wider problem introduced in 5.0, so all we can do is pray for a Hotfix of 5.1!

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XenServer Wobbles Part 2!

Friday, 03 October 2008 18:38 XenPro

The XenServer 5.0 Wobbles just got weirder!

We have a XenServer 5.0 pool, and it's working just fine that's the good news.

The bad news is that although it is working, a number of 'strange' things are happening. Firstly the majority of 'Slave' servers are showing their NICs as being 'Unknown' and 'Disconnected', and some have even lost their NTP details?!

As I said it's working fine in that all VMs are running regardless. So it looks like a bug in the XenConsole for the NICs and the XenServer for NTP.

Let me know if you have anything similar!

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XenServer Wobbles!

Sunday, 28 September 2008 21:07 XenPro

My excitement for XenServer 5.0 has thawed somewhat!

After initially upgrading some of my servers I decided it seemed a stable release, so I upgraded my live pool. All was going fine until I noticed a number of my VMs were hung, which I thought may have been due to the VMs running the old image containing Xen Tools 4.1.

I decided that my strategy was to reboot my servers, so that the hung VMs would pick up the new image containing Xen Tools 5.0. So I migrated my running VMs to other servers, and rebooted the first server, which initially complained as it had running VMs, but they were hung so i went ahead. However, the unthinkable happened the server never came back up!

The server got rebuilt, but I couldn't get it back into the pool as the broken server was still (logically) there, and it wouldn't let you remove it as it thought it still had VMs on it! I have a fix for this that I will post soon if you're in the same situation.

Looking on the Citrix forums there are some possibly related issues where 5.0 servers are randomly becoming uncontactable, which is worrying to say the least.

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Last Updated ( Sunday, 28 September 2008 21:24 )

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XenServer 5 - First Look

Wednesday, 24 September 2008 18:59 XenPro

As promised here's some feedback on the newly released XenServer 5.

The first thing you notice is that XenCenter has had a slight facelift, so is it any good?

To be honest I'm undecided, the pretty exterior has resulted in everything being made bigger, which disappointingly (for me) reduces the amount of information you can see on the page. It appears to have added a tagging feature, which should help you find your VMs when you have lots of them!

XenServer itself seems to have several new features and fixes, and this goes some way to justify the increase in footprint. NIC Bonding and support for VLANs seem to have been improved, which were issues I've had in the past. In particular adding/removing servers from pools with VLANs present now works, which was much needed. The big addition seems to be the inclusion of High Availability (HA) features, although I've not had a chance to see exactly what this is as yet, I'll probably do a HA feature soon.