Pre-release build of XenServer project name Dundee Alpha 1

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Published on Wednesday, 29 April 2015 13:08

Written by Alexander Ervik Johnsen

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XenServer "Dundee" is the next major platform improvement in XenServer.  As with the Creedence pre-release program last year, the XenServer team is providing early access to targetted builds of future releases XenServer.  Our goal is simple, to provide you our users with the ability to see what we're working on and hopefully provide us feedback on how we're doing.  With that in mind, this first drop of Dundee is all about the control domain (dom0).  You asked for CentOS 7, and that's what we have here.  

The following XenServer components have an active pre-release program.  Please be aware that use of pre-release components in a production environment is not supported, and that if support for a production server containing pre-release components is required, you may need to remove those components or revert to a supported configuration. If this is a new component, please don't assume any release timeline; we might be previewing longer term work.

DOCKER INTEGRATION

Information on the integration work for Docker can be found on the Docker Community page.  The pre-release components are designed to work with a XenServer 6.5 installation only.

• Container management supplemental pack - to be installed on XenServer host
• XenCenter - Container management requires updated XenCenter (backwards compatible)
• Container management source bundle

This could be a pretty big change for many of you, so we want your input.  To report any incidents with this build, please use the incident database and select "Dundee" from the version drop down.  As with all pre-release builds, there is no guarantee you can upgrade an existing host, nor is there any guarantee you can upgrade from a pre-release build.  Discussions related to integrating with Dundee, or changes in interfaces can be had on the developer mailing list.
To subscribe to our developer mailing list, please follow the instructions here: https://lists.xenserver.org/sympa/subscribe/xs-devel.

PLEASE NOTE

Having a supported platform is crucial for mission critical applications, and for those who are interested in potentially obtaining product support for XenServer from Citrix, use of a released version of XenServer will qualify for those services.  You can obtain supported versions of XenServer from the main download page.

Click here to learn more

Removing ghost / phantom nic on XenServer

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Published on Wednesday, 21 January 2015 14:24

Written by Alexander Ervik Johnsen

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When upgrading XenServer from Citrix, I've often had issues with what we call ghost NIC 's or phantom NIC 's in Windows. Resulting in network issues. If you have a VM on XenServer and static IP settings you have to be aware you always first install XenServer Tools before configuring the NIC.
If you don't the Tools create a new NIC and the old one become hidden. I've also seen ghost nic's appear after upgrading from one version of XenTools to another. As with the latest version as well. I did a upgrade from XenServer 6.2 to 6.5, and the ghost nic appeared again. So if you configure the new NIC created by the Tools you will get a message the IP already exists on the NIC. This results in a network issue that you can't see when running normal ipconfig or looking at the network nics in Control Panel.

So here is how to solve the issue:

1. Open up command prompt(as a administrator) and use the command set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 (this command creates a environment variable to see hidden devices. Please note that When you close the command prompt the variable is reset to default)
2. Now, in the same command prompt start device manager by command devmgmt.msc (if you don't open the device manager trough this command prompt you the next step will not work)
3. In the Device Manager click on View -> Show hidden devices
4. Now expand the Network Adapters and you will now see that there is grayed out "hidden" NIC's or 1 NIC that you can uninstall. This is done by right clicking on it.

Citrix announces XenServer 6.5

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Published on Tuesday, 13 January 2015 10:52

Written by Alexander Ervik Johnsen

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Citrix has announced XenServer 6.5, the newest release of the company’s commercial virtualization platform based on the open-source Xen Project hypervisor. XenServer now offers a full 64-bit kernel architecture that allows customers to take advantage of the latest hardware and OS platforms, and supports enterprise-grade networking, storage and workload management. XenServer supports Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT), which provides tamper detection of the hypervisor, preventing applications running on a potentially compromised machine. New to this release, asset tagging enables workload geo-tagging, providing users with a way to restrict workloads to run in a particular location for security reasons.  XenServer further extends the company’s industry-leading GPU virtualization capabilities supporting NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology and delivers a 50 percent increase in server density for delivering high-end 3D graphics applications in virtual desktops. With its next-generation kernel architecture supporting both enterprise-grade and carrier-grade features, XenServer is the most comprehensive, cost-effective and open virtualization platform choice for enterprises and service providers.

XenServer continues to be a fundamental platform for Citrix’s long term goal of enabling work and play from anywhere, from any device. With the introduction of XenServer 6.5, Citrix delivers support for the newest 64-bit hardware and latest Guest operating systems, delivering increased vGPU scalability, in-memory read caching and performance improvements in the areas of storage and networking.

To meet with the demands of the evolving mobile enterprise, customers need cloud infrastructure technology that maximizes the flexibility and efficiency of both end-user workspaces and datacenter operations, all in a secure manner. XenServer is a crucial piece of this cloud infrastructure, running mission-critical workloads for some of the world’s largest communication service providers, cloud service providers and enterprises. As an example, 50 percent of XenDesktop® deployments are run on XenServer. Benefits to enterprise and service provider customers include increased operational agility and flexibility by delivering new and existing workloads more quickly, reliably and in greater quantities; enhanced IT efficiencies through higher infrastructure utilization and consolidation ratios; and lower TCO of datacenter operations by maximizing and optimizing infrastructure and capacity utilization.

What’s new in XenServer 6.5:

• All 64-bit -> The control domain, which now utilizes CentOS 5.10 is 64-bit. This removes the previously restrictive low/high memory division of a 32-bit domain and allows for more PCI devices and memory. It is automatically configured in dom0 based on the amount of available free memory on the system.
• 50% increase in GPU density -> Citrix XenServer has led the market in its support for virtualized graphics processors.  GPU passthrough has been around for a while and even some of our competitors also feature it, however it was never a scalable solution for large volumes of desktop virtualization users.  vGPU, introduced a year ago by Citrix with Support for NVIDIA GRID cards meant suddenly, higher numbers of users could get access to advanced graphics in a virtualized desktop scenario. In this release, we’ve scaled our support for vGPU sessions by 50%, now with 96 vGPU sessions per host.  Obviously you need to have the appropriate h/w host to support 3 NVIDIA GRID cards, with all necessary resources to run the numbers of VM, however, it demonstrates how Citrix continues to lead the market for organizations seeking application and desktop virtualization solutions.
• Massive performance improvements -> In-Memory Read-Cache, Storage Improvements, Network Improvements
• Numerous usability enhancements
• The return of the popular Workload Balancing (WLB) appliance
• Latest Xen Project Hypervisor v4.4

New Architecture Delivers Improved Performance
The new 64-bit kernel architecture has resulted in dramatic improvements in networking and storage performance, providing customers with a powerful virtualization platform for running new and existing workloads in their workspace and datacenter environments. As part of this release, enterprise-class features for workload balancing (WLB) and distributed virtual switch controller (DVSC) have also been re-introduced. All these improvements now extend XenServer as the lead choice of some of the largest and most sophisticated clouds in the world.

Industry-leading GPU Virtualization with NVIDIA GRID vGPU Technology
XenServer is the industry’s only open enterprise-grade and carrier-grade virtualization platform delivering highly-scalable GPU virtualization support for NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology and native cloud integration for CloudPlatform™, and other non-proprietary cloud management platforms. With a 50 percent increase in server density, customers using XenDesktop and XenApp® to deliver high-end 3D graphics apps can now achieve a greater density of desktops using XenServer, resulting in dramatically reduced costs and improved end-user experience.

Use host-cpu-tune to Fine tune XenServer 6.2.0 Performance

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Published on Wednesday, 13 August 2014 13:32

Written by Alexander Ervik Johnsen

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Using host-cpu-tune

The tool can be found in /usr/lib/xen/bin/host-cpu-tune. When executed with no parameters, it displays help and this tool allows XenServer administrators to configure a host's dom0 vCPU count and pinning strategy.

Recommendations

The utility works in three distinct modes:

1. Show: This mode displays the current dom0 vCPU count and infer the current pinning strategy.
   Note: This functionality will only examine the current state of the host. If configurations are changed (for example, with the setcommand) and the host has not yet been rebooted, the output may be inaccurate.
2. Advise: This recommends a dom0 vCPU count and a pinning strategy for this host.
   Note: This functionality takes into account the number of pCPUs available in the host and makes a recommendation based on heuristics determined by Citrix. System administrators are encouraged to experiment with different settings and find the one that best suits their workloads.
3. Set: This functionality changes the host configuration to the specified number of dom0 vCPUs and pinning strategy.
   Note: This functionality may change parameters in the host boot configuration files. It is highly recommended to reboot the host as soon as possible after using this command.
   Warning: Setting zero vCPUs to dom0 (with set 0 nopin) will cause the host not to boot.

Resetting to Default

The host-cpu-tune tool uses the same heuristics as the XenServer Installer to determine the number of dom0 vCPUs. The installer, however, never activates exclusive pinning because of race conditions with Rolling Pool Upgrades (RPUs). During RPU, VMs with manual pinning settings can fail to start if exclusive pinning is activated on a newly upgraded host.

To reset the dom0 vCPU pinning strategy to default:

1. Run the following command to find out the number of recommended dom0 vCPUs:
   [root@host ~]# /usr/lib/xen/bin/host-cpu-tune advise
2. Configure the host accordingly, without any pinning:

• [root@host ~]# /usr/lib/xen/bin/host-cpu-tune set <count> nopin
• Where <count> is the recommended number of dom0 vCPUs indicated by the advise command.
2. Reboot the host. The host will now have the same settings as it did when XenServer 6.2.0 was installed. 

Usage in XenServer Pools

Settings configured with this tool only affect a single host. If the intent is to configure an entire pool, this tool must be used on each host separately.

When one or more hosts in the pool are configured with exclusive pinning, migrating VMs between hosts may change the VM's pinning characteristics. For example, if a VM are manually pinned with the vCPU-params:mask parameter, migrating it to a host configured with exclusive pinning may fail. This could happen if one or more of that VM's vCPUs are pinned to a pCPU index exclusively allocated to dom0 on the destination host.

Additional commands to obtain information concerning CPU topology:

xenpm get-cpu-topolgy
xl vcpu-list