Hightower Posted February 17, 2011 Posted February 17, 2011 We have XenServer setup here, and the VM's are running from iSCSI SAN. The LUN the VHD's are on was only 100gb to get up and running. I installed the OS, and now happy that things are running I want more space on the LUN. So, I went in to the Dell Storage Manager for the SAN and gave the LUN more space. However, in Xen it still sees that the LUN only has 100gb, instead of the 300gb it should now have. Anybody got any ideas how I can get Xen to pick up the changes, preferably on the fly without having to turn off the VM's?
bossman Posted February 17, 2011 Posted February 17, 2011 @Hightower: You will probably have to create another LUN with the new size and move all the VMs onto that then delete the old LUN I think off the top of my head (It is early morning and I hav'nt had coffee yet). Or I feel you may have to restart both SAN and Xenserver host.
Hightower Posted February 17, 2011 Author Posted February 17, 2011 @Hightower: You will probably have to create another LUN with the new size and move all the VMs onto that then delete the old LUN I think off the top of my head (It is early morning and I hav'nt had coffee yet). Or I feel you may have to restart both SAN and Xenserver host. Found an article on Xen forums which I'm trying now - will post up the link if it works.
Hightower Posted February 17, 2011 Author Posted February 17, 2011 This article worked a treat: CTX120865 - How to Resize a Storage Repository after Changing the Size of an LVM-based Storage - Citrix Knowledge Center Followed the instructions for 5.5, and then rebooted the host. Can now see new sized LUN. Shame the VM's need to be down for the duration but all in all it only took about 10 minutes, and it's not like we're resizing LUN's every day is it 1
bossman Posted February 17, 2011 Posted February 17, 2011 @Hightower: What version of Xenserver are you running?
Hightower Posted February 17, 2011 Author Posted February 17, 2011 @Hightower: What version of Xenserver are you running? The latest I believe - 5.6.1 FP1 or something along those lines
bossman Posted February 17, 2011 Posted February 17, 2011 We will be upgrading during the hols when we open up the dynamic fail-over through the fundamentals license we acquired last week for 3 hosts. Looking forward to it. Got full school platform migration to do over the 9 days half-term plus above so @webman n me rather busy at the moment.
Hightower Posted February 17, 2011 Author Posted February 17, 2011 We will be upgrading during the hols when we open up the dynamic fail-over through the fundamentals license we acquired last week for 3 hosts. Looking forward to it. Got full school platform migration to do over the 9 days half-term plus above so @webman n me rather busy at the moment. Good good, how much did the fundamentals license cost per host? That will allow you HA won't it? Does it also include dynamic memory too?
localzuk Posted February 17, 2011 Posted February 17, 2011 Hey Hightower, do you mind if I ask what SAN device are you using, what network connectivity it has and how many VMs you run from it? Just thinking about the future here.
bossman Posted February 17, 2011 Posted February 17, 2011 @Hightower: We got the Advanced licenses around £400 each. Had to buy pretty quickly through Ramesys (Capita) who passed on to third party. I really bought for dynamic failover but will have other stuff besides will let you know when we get it all up and running next week. Also bought 5 year SSL cert which was a bargain at £399 from Globalsign through SchoolsICT excellent service I may say also highly recommend
Hightower Posted February 17, 2011 Author Posted February 17, 2011 Hey Hightower, do you mind if I ask what SAN device are you using, what network connectivity it has and how many VMs you run from it? Just thinking about the future here. We just bought a Dell MD3200i with 3 x 500GB drives in RAID 5, so we have about 930GB usable at the moment. 9 spare slots to increase capacity for future. Got an absolutely belting price from Dell Education for it. We only have it with 4 NIC's at the moment, on one controller, but you can get it with 2 controllers if desired. At the moment, while I'm configuring on my desk it is connected directly from Xen host to SAN. However, I plan to move this so we utilise the NICs so Port 0 goes through a different switch to port 1 etc. We're running only 2 VM's off it (for now), but both these are DC's/File Servers/Print Servers etc etc so will be very heavily used. Can't give you any feedback on performance though as only had the SAN a week, and it's only running 1 user/computer at the moment lol. Bossman has a good setup - might be best asking him
teejay Posted February 17, 2011 Posted February 17, 2011 We will be upgrading during the hols when we open up the dynamic fail-over through the fundamentals license we acquired last week for 3 hosts. Looking forward to it. Got full school platform migration to do over the 9 days half-term plus above so @webman n me rather busy at the moment. Have fun with that, I really liked Xen, but it was at that point I gave up and moved to VMWare ESXi as I couldn't get over half our servers to P2V with Xen, YMMV though.
Hightower Posted February 17, 2011 Author Posted February 17, 2011 I really liked ESXi, but the licensing just frazzled my head. I looked at Hyper-V and was really excited about what it said it could do for nothing, but when it won't talk to my SAN after days of trying it's failed in my eyes. So I turned to Xen. First impressions are really good, and the licensing is easy/cheap to upgrade to have HA functionality. It's a winner so far in my eyes.
teejay Posted February 17, 2011 Posted February 17, 2011 We just use the free version of ESXi, does what we need and we're runing 26 virtual servers now
Hightower Posted February 17, 2011 Author Posted February 17, 2011 We are starting out with the basics, but with a view to upgrade to high availability (automatic migrations in event of physical failure) and load balancing. ESXi was never an option to me because the licensing is far too confusing. As Bossman has said, about £400 a server with Xen and the job is a good 'un. No "you'll need two of these, one of these, a dozen of these etc etc". OT, but how do you utilise APC UPS's with Xen @Bossman?
teejay Posted February 17, 2011 Posted February 17, 2011 Yes I know what you mean about the ESXi licensing, part of the reason we've stuck with the free version. The extra bells and whistles are nice, but in 18 months of having virtualised servers I haven't found any need for them. I would've liked to stick with XEN, it was just the P2V conversion that went pear shaped for us with it. After over a week of trying, I stuck ESXi on and got them all converted in a couple of days. From my experience, if you are planning to do some P2V conversions then test them at an early stage, especially the more tricky ones with service partions, RAID, multiple volumes etc, oh and any Linux servers you may have as they're fun as well. It's well worth playing with some of the other P2V utilities, I got a couple of servers to transfer to XEN by doing a two stage P2V using the VMWare conversion utility.
webman Posted February 17, 2011 Posted February 17, 2011 Have fun with that, I really liked Xen, but it was at that point I gave up and moved to VMWare ESXi as I couldn't get over half our servers to P2V with Xen, YMMV though. Xen P2V has worked great for what we've done so far. We even virtualised our SIMS server just as a test, and it worked fine. When doing Linux ones, I prefer to set up a fresh install with the correct Xen-compatible Kernel (to get a proper paravirtualised install) and just migrate services/data.
bossman Posted February 17, 2011 Posted February 17, 2011 @Hightower: Hav'nt looked at that yet (Give me a chance hehe! pretty hectic here at the mo ;D) but have a guy coming to show off VDIs and he will know, if he doesn't then he will know a guy who does. He is from a company called "Blue Chip" so arranged for some costings of 25 concurrent licenses for Citrix VDIs and he will be out on the 8th March to discuss. I would think it will have to be a third party piece of software installed on the hosts which integrates with the APC UPSs for a clean shutdown when the power has been cut for a certain time.
teejay Posted February 17, 2011 Posted February 17, 2011 Xen P2V has worked great for what we've done so far. We even virtualised our SIMS server just as a test, and it worked fine. When doing Linux ones, I prefer to set up a fresh install with the correct Xen-compatible Kernel (to get a proper paravirtualised install) and just migrate services/data. That's great, sounds like they've made big improvements to the tools over the last 18 months since I tried it. I may have just been unlucky, I only had 2 weeks to do it all and was really under pressure to get it finished, so had to try some drastic options as I only had a few days left. Good advice with Linux btw.
webman Posted February 17, 2011 Posted February 17, 2011 teejay: Yes, this was only about 6-8 months ago. Thanks Hightower: How do you get xenserver and associated vms to gracefully shutdown after power failure? - Server Fault 2
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