Installing XenServer to USB or SD
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Anyone have experience setting this up? It's being done in our lab shortly and I wanted to collected resources for the lab team to work from.
http://www.ryv.id.au/2014/02/xenserver-62-installed-on-usb-drive-and.html
http://beaukey.blogspot.com/2012/05/running-xenserver-from-usb-stick.html
http://blog.citrix24.com/install-xenserver-6-usb-stick/
http://www.syndicateinfo.com/how-to-install-citrix-xenserver-to-boot-from-usb-device/
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@scottalanmiller "The lab team". LOL. What's Mike doing now?
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Sounds like a cool project. I don't have any experience with it... just installed XenServer to a local disk when I did it for my home lab.
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As this is a lab the main servers are diskless and using shared storage in the back. No worries about reliability like in a production environment so storage consolidation is the key there. So hypervisors to USB sticks or SD cards when possible and shared iSCSI SAN on the back end.
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The NTG interns really get to do a lot of cool projects. Not many interns can get this kind of experience in high school.
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@scottalanmiller I've read a blog post recently about booting XenServer boxes via PXE boot and a bootstrap script (not sure if I am using that term correctly). They would then automatically join a farm and provision or transfer machines depending on load.
I will take a look around to see if I can't find it.
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@coliver said:
@scottalanmiller I've read a blog post recently about booting XenServer boxes via PXE boot and a bootstrap script (not sure if I am using that term correctly). They would then automatically join a farm and provision or transfer machines depending on load.
I will take a look around to see if I can't find it.
Is that using MaaS or some other setup?
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@scottalanmiller Hmm, the closest thing I can find was an OpenStack blog post about PXE installation... not what I was thinking though. It must have been awhile ago when I was getting into it.
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OpenStack normally means Xen, but not always.
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Here it is but it is PXE installation and not booting... I will try and find the one I am thinking of but it may not exist.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
@scottalanmiller I've read a blog post recently about booting XenServer boxes via PXE boot and a bootstrap script (not sure if I am using that term correctly). They would then automatically join a farm and provision or transfer machines depending on load.
I will take a look around to see if I can't find it.
Is that using MaaS or some other setup?
Also I've never heard of MaaS before interesting concept, it seems like something that larger companies would be using for their infrastructure.
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@coliver MaaS is a very cool concept, but seems to be engineered more for large nodes of low powered servers all running the same software, but with a central shared storage device, rather than having drives in every machine.
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@coliver yes, cloud in general is large companies only. MaaS is even a step beyond that. So typically fairly large.
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@Mike-Ralston said:
@coliver MaaS is a very cool concept, but seems to be engineered more for large nodes of low powered servers all running the same software, but with a central shared storage device, rather than having drives in every machine.
Low power isn't really a factor. It is meant for any cloud hardware platform that needs to swap out nodes. Cloud is always shared storage. MaaS or a MaaS-like concept would apply as a potential value to any cloud platform. It makes the addition or replacement of nodes much easier. Since clouds are all the same software by definition, it always fits there. A normal cloud of any size adds or replaces nodes quite regularly so MaaS provides a lot of value very quickly in most scenarios.
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So would this be something like OpenStack or CloudStack? Or are those just a management/obfuscation layer?
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@coliver said:
So would this be something like OpenStack or CloudStack? Or are those just a management/obfuscation layer?
No, MaaS is designed to help OpenStack specifically (but you can use anywhere. OpenStack is the cloud layer. This is a hardware management layer that makes tons of sense in a cloud scenario. It could be used without cloud, like for a computer cluster (Hadoop maybe) but would be uncommon. And you normally use cloud without MaaS. But it works really well for clouds to make them less effort to manage at the hardware level.
