BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer

BRRABill

We know you can still break it!

I'm planning to migrate my XS booting off of USB and onto a RAID array so there is still a chance.

Though since it was pretty pain free to do, I might just wait until the USB stick croaks.

Nah.....

DustinB3403

@BRRABill said in BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer:

@olivier said in BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer:

@BRRABill well, not in my world (more corporate world than lab env). In average, there is more SR lost or problems which need to restore entirely a VM. And if you are in a pool, losing one host completely is just a non-event.

I'm just mentioning it because in the past few months we've had it happen to at least two people here (@Dashrender and I forget who else), and since a lot of the time XS is recommended to people looking for a hypervisor that are just moving to virtualization, I just thought it might be appropriate for them.

The solution though is very simple.

Shutdown the host, and clone the USB drive.

Or if you don't want to install to USB, create two partitions on your hardware a small 32GB partition, and the rest for installation. Install and go. You then have a boot partition in RAID1, and the other in RAID10.

Problem solved. Albeit more expensively.

travisdh1

@BRRABill said in BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer:

@DustinB3403 said

To be fair, you've done some weird things with your XS installations..

Hasn't happened to me yet!

Actually.... I literally broke a usb stick the other day. Forgot it was plugged in when I was rerouting cables and popped it off the front port... The R900 wasn't even scratched.

BRRABill

You know, this might belong in its own thread, but...

I know it's a terrible idea to restore a DC. Always better to reinstall and promote.

But what about moving one from one XS to another?

momurda

@BRRABill You mean just migrating a running vm that is a AD DC? Done it many times.

olivier

@BRRABill said in BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer:

You know, this might belong in its own thread, but...

I know it's a terrible idea to restore a DC. Always better to reinstall and promote.

But what about moving one from one XS to another?

I'm so happy in the Linux world. Not trolling about MS products, just facts about fragile some windows VMs can be when there is a problem.

My clients experiencing the VDI corrupt stuff:

3 Windows VMs, all corrupted
6 Linux VMs, some with database or web server: no problem

Can be a complete random (very small number to draw any conclusion), but still. That's very common.

BRRABill

@momurda said in BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer:

@BRRABill You mean just migrating a running vm that is a AD DC? Done it many times.

Or shutting it down and doing a full move.

BRRABill

@olivier said in BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer:

@BRRABill said in BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer:

You know, this might belong in its own thread, but...

I know it's a terrible idea to restore a DC. Always better to reinstall and promote.

But what about moving one from one XS to another?

I'm so happy in the Linux world. Not trolling about MS products, just facts about fragile some windows VMs can be when there is a problem.

My clients experiencing the VDI corrupt stuff:

3 Windows VMs, all corrupted

6 Linux VMs, some with database or web server: no problem

Can be a complete random (very small number to draw any conclusion), but still. That's very common.

I still don't understand why AD isn't smart enough to just fix itself.

olivier

@BRRABill It's a monolithic/packaged/all in one solution, with a lot of layers. So it makes sense in a way.

momurda

Try moving your vdi while vm is running, to another SR, very exciting as you dont know if you will get the dreaded, 'The VDI mirroring cannot be performed" and your vdi just disappears. Luckily it is just detached and back in its original SR. Seems to only happen with windows vms for me

olivier

@momurda said in BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer:

Try moving your vdi while vm is running, to another SR, very exciting as you dont know if you will get the dreaded, 'The VDI mirroring cannot be performed" and your vdi just disappears. Luckily it is just detached and back in its original SR. Seems to only happen with windows vms for me

Ouch. Tools installed I suppose. This error mean tapdisk failed to write new blocks to the destination (XenServer issue)

Danp

@olivier said in BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer:

@Danp Thanks. If you have any log, feel free to share

Just sent it to your support email address.

olivier

Thanks. But without the debug option, I'm afraid we won't spot anything.

Danp

@olivier Which debug option? I I already have "verboseApiLogsOnErrors": true in the config.json file.

olivier

@Danp Well, so we don't have enough to draw any conclusion

Danp

@olivier Ok... I'm sure there will be more patches soon to test again.

BRRABill

@olivier

I used XO tonight to reboot a XS and it got stuck in maintenance mode.

Think that was something strange on my end?

(I ended up using XC to reboot it afterwards.)

Danp

@BRRABill It's a bug. Here's the GH Issue.

BRRABill

Stupid GitHub.

Just. Don't. Get. It.

BRRABill

@Danp said in BRRABill's Field Report With XenServer:

@BRRABill It's a bug. Here's the GH Issue.

So what causes that bug?

I was just trying to reboot after a patch update.