I thought I'd kick off my Citrix blog with a question I get pretty often from Linux enthusiasts: how to install unsupported Linux distributions on XenServer 4.1.
The most common solution people find is to use the "Other Install Media" template, insert the distribution installation CD, and find that the mouse cursor doesn't work when they boot into X11. The reason for this is that they are using the hardware-assisted emulation mode of installing Linux. In this mode (dubbed "HVM"), all input and output is emulated, and in particular the mouse interface uses the USB tablet interface. If the distribution doesn't include a driver for USB tablets, then no mouse will appear.
Windows guests run at high-speed in HVM mode due to the installation of the XenServer tools which install high-speed drivers, but these are not necessary for Linux distributions since they can be run in para-virtualized mode (dubbed "PV"). This involves obtaining a Xen-enabled PV kernel from the distribution, and modifying the VM record in XenServer to boot into this kernel instead of HVM mode. The XenServer built-in templates for popular distributions such as RHEL, CentOS or SUSE Linux already automate all this and are in PV mode from the installer onwards.
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We were unable to find any info googling. It appears you cannot boot a Paravirtualized DomU directly to CD-ROM? So we temporarily changed our Paravirtual Xen DomU to boot from HVM or Full Virtual Machine. Our environment has Xen running on HVM capable hardware (we can run Full Virtualization) with LVM Block devices for disks. Our Paravirtual DomU is called guest-1 First backup your Running Xen config. Save it to /etc/xen/vm/guest-1.run xm list -l guest-1 >/etc/xen/vm/guest-1.run You will use this file later on. Novell’s documentation on how to save Running Xen DomU config. http://www.novell.com/documentation/vmserver/pdfdoc/config_options/config_options.pdf Look for “Virtual Machine Settings”. I found it easier to modify the startup config in /etc/xen/vm/guest-1 than modify the file that is outputted from the Novell Running config backup. Backup the original Startup config (I believe this file gets created when you first build a new VM in virt-manager.)
Does anyone know of Best Practices for virtual machine backups? Is there anything published? Is there a need to define best practices for XenServer backups? !!!See script details in thread!!!!
The xen-vm-autosnapshot.py script has been updated with an important new option: –snapshot-tag. I still can’t believe I made such a silly oversight, but previous versions of this script had no way of differentiating between snapshots created automatically and those that were created manually. So if you happened to have some old manual snapshots lying around, the snapshot-rotate routine would have rotated them along with all the rest.
backing up your xen domains posted february 10th, 2008 by john in debian etch tech xen backups are boring, but we all know how important they are. backups can also be quite powerful when working with xen virtualization, since xen allows for convenient back-up and restore of entire systems. i've recently been working on a flexible, general-purpose script enabling incremental backups of complete xen guests, optimized for secure, distributed environments
What is StorageLink? Citrix StorageLink™ technology lets your virtual server infrastructures fully leverage all the resources and functionality of existing storage systems. StorageLink supports third party storage architectures and delivers deep integration with leading storage platforms.
he following will install and configure DRBD, OpenAIS, Pacemaker and Xen on OpenSUSE 11.1 to provide highly-available virtual machines. This setup does not utilize Xen's live migration capabilities. Instead, VMs will be started on the secondary node as soon as failure of the primary is detected. Xen virtual disk images are replicated between nodes using DRBD and all services on the cluster will be managed by OpenAIS and Pacemaker. The following setup utilizes DRBD 8.3.2 and Pacemaker 1.0.4. It is important to note that DRBD 8.3.2 has come a long way since previous versions in terms of compatibility with Pacemaker. In particular, a new DRBD OCF resource agent script and new DRBD-level resource fencing features. This configuration will not work with older releases of DRBD.