What You Need to Know About XenServer
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@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@dafyre said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
I think the general consensus is to start with one core and add more if performance sucks.
Virtual?
Always! You should have a reason to be physical otherwise virtual.
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@wirestyle22 Sorry, yeah.
Unless you're running a lot of heavily used VMs, a dual or quadcore CPU would be fine. My box at home runs a quad core cpu and has 5 or 6 VMs on it with no issues.
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@coliver said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@dafyre said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
I think the general consensus is to start with one core and add more if performance sucks.
Virtual?
Always! You should have a reason to be physical otherwise virtual.
Just for my own knowledge, what would be a good reason to go physical? Just for a point of reference.
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@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@coliver said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@dafyre said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
I think the general consensus is to start with one core and add more if performance sucks.
Virtual?
Always! You should have a reason to be physical otherwise virtual.
Just for my own knowledge, what would be a good reason to go physical? Just for a point of reference.
Again... General concensus around here is the only thing you need Physical for is to install the hypervisor. Everything should be virtual these days.
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@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@coliver said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@dafyre said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
I think the general consensus is to start with one core and add more if performance sucks.
Virtual?
Always! You should have a reason to be physical otherwise virtual.
Just for my own knowledge, what would be a good reason to go physical? Just for a point of reference.
Maybe NAS/SAN storage, where massive I/Os and scalability is needed (note that you can connect a massive SAN/NAS to a pool so...).
Also, even real-time operations could be done with an Hypervisor now (Xen is going at full speed in automotive industry, via XenRT and Xen ARM projects).
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@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@coliver said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@dafyre said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
I think the general consensus is to start with one core and add more if performance sucks.
Virtual?
Always! You should have a reason to be physical otherwise virtual.
Just for my own knowledge, what would be a good reason to go physical? Just for a point of reference.
If you have a reason to install physical you will know it. The reasons are so rare that you will most likely never run into one.
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@wirestyle22 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
Extremely easy install. Everything up and running. Reading/Testing more tonight. How are you guys determining the need for virtual/physical cores per server etc?
There is some nice performance monitoring built right into XC and XO. That's a good place to watch and see if anything (CPU, RAM, etc.) needs to be increased.
@scottalanmiller ... one more thing you might want to add to your initial writeup is to install the XenTools onto each VM for optimal performance monitoring and VM functionality
P.S. @wirestyle22 install the XenTools on your VMs if you haven't already. You'll find them on the ISO repository. Just inser the tools ISO and run it.
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I'm currently writing a complete guide/blog post on Xen tools.
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@DustinB3403 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
The reason being that LOCAL repo's aren't supported, is that it literally takes nothing to share out a drive from a windows desktop and connect to it via XenCenter (or XO).
It's a 5 minute process.
And why should I be required to have a separate piece of hardware just to hold ISO files for the various VM's I wish to mount?
I can use shared storage with Hyper-V (and I assume VMWare, never tried), but local storage is is always going to be faster.
You also do not modify the contents of the ISO repository often. You load up the various ISO files once and never touch it again unless you get a new shiny thing. At that point updating that repo is no different than updating said shared storage.
It is a huge oversight to not have the capability.
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@JaredBusch XenServer wasn't designed for home usage, but for companies which already have plenty of shares (NFS/SMB). It explains why it's not meant like this "in a easy way".
But it will work with a local ISO storage, it's just not really user friendly.
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@olivier said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
I'm currently writing a complete guide/blog post on Xen tools.
I'm not being a smart ass, but what is there to guide?
Install ISO, run setup.
Am I missing something?
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@BRRABill A lot of XS noobs seems lost with that, and the official doc is not very great.
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@olivier said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@BRRABill A lot of XS noobs seems lost with that, and the official doc is not very great.
It would be nice to know what you have with and without. I think that would explain why it is needed.
I think they confused things a bit with XC7 by including the "windows updates" thing. Are you going to touch on that? (I bet you'd get a lot of Google hits on that one.)
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@JaredBusch said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@DustinB3403 said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
The reason being that LOCAL repo's aren't supported, is that it literally takes nothing to share out a drive from a windows desktop and connect to it via XenCenter (or XO).
It's a 5 minute process.
And why should I be required to have a separate piece of hardware just to hold ISO files for the various VM's I wish to mount?
I can use shared storage with Hyper-V (and I assume VMWare, never tried), but local storage is is always going to be faster.
You also do not modify the contents of the ISO repository often. You load up the various ISO files once and never touch it again unless you get a new shiny thing. At that point updating that repo is no different than updating said shared storage.
It is a huge oversight to not have the capability.
Oh I don't disagree, but it's not a deal breaker for something so trivial to setup.
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@BRRABill The thing is, I'm not a Windows expert. I'll take a look at this.
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@olivier said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@BRRABill The thing is, I'm not a Windows expert. I'll take a look at this.
I think it is a paid feature, perhaps. But it looks odd to see something as "not installed", even though in our installation it is fine.
http://discussions.citrix.com/topic/378399-upgraded-to-xenserver-70/
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@olivier said in What You Need to Know About XenServer:
@BRRABill The thing is, I'm not a Windows expert. I'll take a look at this.
From that thread I posted, the bottom line is this:
"Bottom line: Must be a newly created Windows VM under XS 7.0 that supports the Windows update manager. Nothing else currently will work. It must also be an Enterprise licensed version of XenServer."And it seems like most will just update the tools manually.
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Brilliant Read, I've used Esxi and Hyper-V, good products, but I do have a inner love for Xencenter..
