Running Systems

Following my experience with OracleVM, I am adding my post-install steps for your pleasure. These steps are not mandatory, by design, but will help you get up and running faster and easier. These steps are relevant to Oracle VM 2.2, but might work for older (and newer) versions as well.

Define bonding

You should read more about it in my past post.

Define storage multipathing

You can read about it here.

Define NTP

Define NTP servers for your Oracle VM host. Make sure the daemon ‘ntpd’ is running, and following an initial time update, via

ntpdate -u <server>

to set the clock right initially, perform a sync to the hardware clock, for good measures

hwclock –systohc

Make sure NTPD starts on boot:

chkconfig ntpd on

Install Linux VM

If the system is going to be stand-alone, you might like to run your VM Manager on it (we will deal with issues of it later). To do so, you will need to install your own Linux machine, since Oracle supplied image fails (or at least – failed for me!) for no apparent reason (kernel panic, to be exact, on a fully MD5 checked image). You could perform this action from the command line by running the command

virt-install -n linux_machine -r 1024 -p –nographics -l nfs://iso_server:/mount

This directive installs a VM called “linux_machine” from nfs iso_server:/mount, with 1GB RAM. You will be asked about where to place the VM disk, and you should place it in /OVS/running_pool/linux_machine , accordingly.

It assumes you have DHCP available for the install procedure, etc.

Install Oracle VM Manager on the virtual Linux machine

This should be performed if you select to manage your VMs from a VM. This is a bit tricky, as you are recommended not to do so if you designing HA-enabled server pool.

Define autostart to all your VMs

Or, at least, those you want to auto start. Create a link from /OVS/running_pool/<VM_NAME>/vm.cfg to /etc/xen/auto/

The order in which ‘ls’ command will see them in /etc/xen/auto/ is the order in which they will be called.

Disable or relocate auto-suspending

Auto-suspend is cool, but your default Oracle VM installation has shortage of space under /var/lib/xen/save/ directory, where persistent memory dumps are kept.  On a 16GB RAM system, this can get pretty high, which is far more than your space can contain.

Either increase the size (mount something else there, I assume), or edit /etc/sysconfig/xendomains and comment the line  with the directive XENDOMAINS_SAVE= . You could also change the desired path to somewhere you have enough space on.

Hashing this directive will force regular shutdown to your VMs following a power off/reboot command to the Oracle VM.

Make sure auto-start VMs actually start

This is an annoying bug. For auto-start of VMs, you need /OVS up and available. Since it’s OCFS2 file system, it takes a short while (being performed by ovs-agent).

Since ovs-agent takes a while, we need to implement a startup script after it and before xendomains. Since both are markes “S99″ (check /etc/rc3.d/ for details), we would add a script called “sleep”.

The script should be placed in /etc/init.d/

#!/bin/bash
#
# sleep     Workaround Oracle VM delay issues
#
# chkconfig: 2345 99 99
# description: Adds a predefined delay to the initialization process
#
 
DELAY=60
 
case "$1" in
start) sleep $DELAY
;;
esac
exit 0

Place the script as a file called “sleep” (omit the suffix I added in this post), set it to be executable, and then run

chkconfig –add sleep

This will solve VM startup problems.

Fix /etc/hosts file

If you are into multi-server pool, you will need that the host name would not be defined to 127.0.0.1 address. By default, Oracle VM defines it to match 127.0.0.1, which will result in a poor attempt to create multi-server pool.

This is all I have had in mind for now. It should solve most new-comer issues with Oracle VM, and allow you to make good use of it. It’s a nice system, albeit it’s ugly management.

Update the OracleVM

You could use Oracle’s unbreakable network, if you are a paying customer, or you could use the Public Yum Server for your system.

Updates to Oracle VM Manager

If you won’t use Oracle Grid Control (Enterprise Manager) to manage the pool, you will probably use Oracle VM Manager. You would need to update the ovs-console package, and you will probably want to add tightvnc-java package, so that IE users will be able to use the web-based VNC services. You would better grub these packages from here.

Assuming your storage is capable of replication, a bunch of VMs could be happily replicated to an alternate location, where you can start them on will (and on crisis, most likely).

This procedure, in theory, is rather simple. I have discovered that it is less so, especially if your system goes into testing once a while.

This leaves some “memories” with Citrix XenServer, as well as the underlayer OS.

The forums show examples of how to handle iSCSI re-attach, so I am adding here hot to handle fiber channel re-attach operation as well, especially if you’re using multipath.

Grab the SCSI ID

The SCSI ID is very important, as it is he basic identified of the LUN:

xe sr-proble type=lvmohba 2>&1

This will show a section (XML-like) under “SCSIid” containing the device’s SCSI ID. Also – grab the UUID of the device, as XenServer assigns. You could do this with:

xe sr-probe type=lvmohba device-config:SCSIid=<Enter SCSI ID here>

Introduce the Device

The system needs the device introduced. For that we’ll use the above captured UUID:

xe sr-introduce uuid=<Enter the UUID obtained before> shared=true typb=lvmohba namb-label=”Imported SR”

Keep the UUID returned by this command. I will reference to it as “SR UUID”

Create PBD for each host in the pool

This should be performed for each host, based on the UUID of all hosts:

xe pbd-create sr-uuid=<Enter the SR UUID obtained before> device-config=SCSIid=<Enter SCSI ID> host-uuid=<Enter UUID of host>

The result value, for each host, is the pbd UUID for that specific host. pbd is a physical Block Device, meaning – the “connection” of the Storage Repository (which is pool-wide) to the specific host.

Plug PBDs

For each of the pbd UUID obtained above, run the following command to plug it in:

xe pbd-plug uuid=<pbd UUID as obtained above>

That should be all.

For ease of repeat, below is a script to perform these exact actions automatically. It assumes one (1) unallocated LUN at the beginning of the process. It will probably behave differently for more than one.

#!/bin/bash
SCSIID=`xe sr-probe type=lvmohba 2>&1 | grep -A1 SCSIid | grep -v SCSIid | grep -v vendor | tail -1 | awk '{print $NF}'`
echo "scsi ID: $SCSIID"
UUID=`xe sr-probe type=lvmohba device-config:SCSIid=$SCSIID | grep -A1 UUID | grep -v UUID | grep -v Devlist | head -1 | awk '{print $NF}'`
echo "SR UUID $UUID"
SRID=`xe sr-introduce uuid=$UUID name-label="Imported SR" shared=true type=lvmohba`
echo "SR UID: $SRID"
HOSTID=`xe host-list  | grep uuid | awk '{print $NF}'`
PBDID=""
for i in $HOSTID
do 
   PBDID="$PBDID `xe pbd-create sr-uuid=$SRID device-config:SCSIid=$SCSIID host-uuid=$i`"
done
for i in $PBDID
do
   xe pbd-plug uuid=$i
done

Oracle VM, out of the box, does not allow network bonds. An excellent guide on how to enable bonding which I have partially followed, has convinced me that changing the relevant scripts would be better. That I have done, and reported in this wiki post.

To sum things up – configure bonding/VLAN tagging as you would have normally do on any RHEL-based Linux distro, and replace the script /etc/xen/scripts/network-bridges with the modified one mentioned below. This script will define bridge for each network interface node already defined as bridge, or slave of a bond connection, as part of the xend service.

#!/bin/bash 
# 
# Runs network-bridge against each ethernet card. 
# 
 
dir=$(dirname "$0") 
 
run_all_ethernets() 
{ 
    devnum=0
    for f in /sys/class/net/*; do 
        netdev=$(basename $f) 
        if [[ $netdev =~ "^bond[0-9.]+$" ]] || [[ $netdev =~ "^eth[0-9.]+$" ]]; then 
		# devnum=${netdev:3} 
		unset SLAVE MASTER BRIDGE
		. /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-${netdev}
		if [[ `echo $SLAVE | egrep "yes|YES|1"` ]] || [[ -n "$BRIDGE" ]] ;then            
			echo "Interface ${netdev} is being defined and claimed by someone else"
		else	
			if [[ $netdev =~ "^((eth)|(bond))[0-9]+\." ]]; then
				# This is vlan tagging, and we want persistent vlan name!
				VLAN=$(echo $netdev | cut -f2 -d.)
				# Assume tags are unique on a server - no several bridges for a single tag.
				# If you intend on having eth2.3 and eth3.3 to your vms as bridges (and not deal with it
				# on the host level), this script is not for you
				$dir/network-bridge "$@" "netdev=${netdev}" "bridge=xenbrv${VLAN}"
			else
				$dir/network-bridge "$@" "netdev=${netdev}" "bridge=xenbr${devnum}" 
				let devnum++
			fi
	  	fi
        fi  
    done 
} 
 
run_all_ethernets "$@"

I have had a stressed time, and had no time to actually write down anything here. This is pity, since I have been doing so many things worth sharing.
I will start with a small one now – how to convert a physical machine into Xen-based VM. I assume you know the drill of how to do P2V in whatever method you like. My preferred method is of booting into a new system (virtual) and then manually building the partitions, LVM, etc, and using ‘tar’ with ‘nc’ to copy files from the source server to the target server. I might elaborate more about it some time, but this post is about the next phase – We have now previously physical server which used to use /dev/sdX or /dev/cciss/cXdXpX, or whatever else, and we need to make it Xen-friendly.
This procedure will apply to RedHat’s Xen-based virtualization, OracleVM or Citrix XenServer.
I assume that the target system maintains LVM settings and mount points as the original one.
These are the steps that need to be performed, manually.
I used CactiEZ image, installed as HVM on Citrix XenServer as my example. This procedure should apply to all Linux systems, with respect to their package manager.

Edit /etc/modprobe.conf

Change eth0,1,whatever alias to xennet

Change/add alias of scsi_hostadapter to xenblk

Edit /etc/blkid.tab

Run the command

sed -i ‘s/hd/xvd/g’ /etc/blkid.tab

to change references if you use labels. These will be used by rc.sysinit later during boot sequence, and we need them configured correctly.

Get Paravirtualized Kernel

yum install kernel-xenU

Edit /etc/securetty

Add the line “xvc0″ to it. Notice, it’s zero and not ‘o’

Edit /etc/inittab

Replace tty1 with xvc0

Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Change the default entry to be the one with the xenU kernel

Replace ‘/dev/sda’ with ‘/dev/xvda’

Edit /boot/grub/device.map

Replace ‘/dev/sda’ with ‘/dev/xvda’

Edit /etc/fstab

Verify labels are used (and then – see changes to blkid.tab above), or devices are renamed to xvd[a-z]

Reboot into PV-enabled VM

This should do it. The VM will attempt to detect new hardware, network MAC changes, etc, but it will work fine.

On RHEL-type of systems, with virt-manager (libvirt), you can make use of virt-manager to easy your life. I, for myself, prefer to work with ‘xm‘ tools, but for the initial install, virt-manager is the quickest and most simple available tool.

To install a new Linux VM, all you need to follow this flow

Create an LV for your VM (I use LVs because it’s easier to manage). If not LV, use a file. To create an LV, run the following command

lvcreate -L 10G -n new_vm1 VolGroup00

I assume that the name you wish to grant is ‘new_vm1′ (better maintain order there, else you will find yourself with hundreds of small LVs you have no idea what to do with), and that the name of the volume group is ‘VolGroup00′. Change to different values to match your environment.

Next, make sure you have your ISO contents unpacked (you can use loop device) and exported via NFS (my favorite method).

To mount a CD/DVD ISO, you should use ‘mount’ command with the ‘loop’ options. This would look like this:

mount -o loop my_iso.iso /mnt/temp

Again, I assume the name of the ISO is my_iso.iso and that the target directory /mnt/temp is available.

Now, export your newly created directory. If you have NFS already running, you can either add to /etc/exports the newly mounted directory /mnt/temp and restart the ‘nfs’ service, or you could use ‘exportfs’ to add it:

exportfs -o no_root_squash *:/mnt/temp

would probably do the trick. I added ‘no_root_squash’ to make sure no permission/access problems present themselves during the installation phase. Test your export to verify it’s working.

Now you could begin your installation. Run the following command:

virt-install -n new_vm1 -r 512 -p -f /dev/VolGroup00/new_vm1 –nographics nfs://nfs_server:/mnt/temp

The name follows the ‘-n’ flag. The amount of RAM to give is 512MB. The -p means it’s paravirtualized. The -f shows which device will be the block device, and the last argument is the source of the installation. Do not use local files, as the VM installer should be able to access the installation source.

Following that, you should have a very nice TUI installation experience.

Now – let’s make this machine ‘xm’ compatible.

Currently, the VM is virt-manager compatible. It means you need virt-manager to start/stop it correctly. Since I prefer ‘xm’ commands, I will show you how to convert this machine to VM.

First – export its XML file:

virsh dumpxml new_vm1 > /tmp/new_vm1.xml

virsh domxml-to-native xen-xm /tmp/new_vm1.xml > /etc/xen/new_vm1

This should do the trick.

Now you can turn the newly created VM off, and remove the VM from virt-manager using

virsh undefine new_vm1

and you’re back to ‘xm’-only interface.

It has been long since I had the time to write here. I have recently been involved more and more with XenServer virtualization, as you might see in the blogs, and following a solution to a rather common problem, I have decided to post it here.

The problem: When attempting to boot a Linux VM on XenServer (5.0 and 5.5), you get the following error message:

Error: Starting VM ‘Cacti’ – Internal error: Failure(“Error from xenguesthelper: caught exception: Failure(\\\”Subprocess failure: Failure(\\\\\\\”xc_dom_linux_build: [2] xc_dom_find_loader: no loader found\\\\\\\\n\\\\\\\”)\\\”)”)

This is very common with Linux VMs which were converted from physical (or other, non-PV virtualization) to XenServer.

This will probably either happen during the P2V process, or after a successful update to the Linux VM.

The cause is that the original kernel, non PV-aware one, has not been removed, and GRUB likes to load from it. XenServer will use the GRUB menu, but will not display it to us to select our desired kernel.

With no chance to intervene, XenServer will attempt to load a PV-enabled machine using non-PV kernel, and will fail.

Preventing the problem is quite simple – remove your non-PV kernel (non-xen) so that future updates will not attempt to update it as well and set it to be the default kernel. Very simple.

Solving the problem in less than two minutes is a bit more tricky. Let’s see how to solve it.

All operations are performed from within the control domain. This guide does not apply to StorageLink or NetApp/Equalogic devices, as they behave differently. This applies only to LVM-over-something, whatever it may be.

First, we will need to find the name of the VDI we are to work on. Use xe in the following manner, using the VM’s name:

xe vbd-list vm-name-label=Cacti

uuid ( RO)             : 128f29dc-4a14-1a2d-75d1-8674d3d2403b
vm-uuid ( RO): eae053de-4a20-28a5-f335-f5a18dd79993
vm-name-label ( RO): Cacti
vdi-uuid ( RO): 90524af4-5b20-4412-9bfe-f1fe27f220b1
empty ( RO): false
device ( RO): xvda

uuid ( RO)             : de177727-b28a-8b79-e73e-d08366d56277
vm-uuid ( RO): eae053de-4a20-28a5-f335-f5a18dd79993
vm-name-label ( RO): Cacti
vdi-uuid ( RO): <not in database>
empty ( RO): true
device ( RO): xvdd

It is very common that xvdd is used for CDROM, so we can safely ignore the second section. The first section is the more interesting one. There is a correlation between the name of the VDI and the name of the LVM on the disk. We can find this specific LV using the following command. Notice that the name of the VDI is used here as the argument for the ‘grep’ command:

lvs | grep 90524af4-5b20-4412-9bfe-f1fe27f220b1

LV-90524af4-5b20-4412-9bfe-f1fe27f220b1 VG_XenStorage-4aa20fc2-fd92-20c2-c549-bed2597c622b -wi-a-  10.00G

We now have our LV path! As you can see, its status is offline. We need to set it to online state. Using both the LV and the VG name, we can do it like that:

lvchange -ay /dev/VG_XenStorage-4aa20fc2-fd92-20c2-c549-bed2597c622b/LV-90524af4-5b20-4412-9bfe-f1fe27f220b1

Now we can access the volume. We can actually check that the problem is the one we look for, using pygrub:

pygrub /dev/VG_XenStorage-4aa20fc2-fd92-20c2-c549-bed2597c622b/LV-90524af4-5b20-4412-9bfe-f1fe27f220b1

We should now see the GRUB menu of the VM at question. If you don’t see any menu, either you have missed a step or used the wrong disk.

The menu should show you all the list of kernels. The default one is the one highlighted, and if it doesn’t include the word “xen” with it, most likely that we have found the problem.

We now need to change to a PV-capable kernel. We will need to access the “/boot” partition of the Linux VM, and change GRUB’s options there.

First we map the disk to a loop device, so we can access its partitions:

losetup /dev/loop1 /dev/VG_XenStorage-4aa20fc2-fd92-20c2-c549-bed2597c622b/LV-90524af4-5b20-4412-9bfe-f1fe27f220b1

Notice that you need to use the entire path to the LV, that the LV is online, and that loop1 is not in use. If it is, you will have a message saying something like “LOOP_SET_FD: Device or resource busy”

Now we need to access its partitions. We will map them using ‘kpartx’ to /dev/mapper/ devices. Notice we’re using the same loop device name:

kaprtx -a /dev/loop1

Now, new files present themselves in /dev/mapper:

ls -la /dev/mapper/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root     220 Oct 24 12:39 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root   16560 Oct 24 12:31 ..
crw——-  1 root root  10, 62 Sep 29 10:15 control
brw-rw—-  1 root disk 252,  5 Oct 24 12:39 loop1p1
brw-rw—-  1 root disk 252,  6 Oct 24 12:39 loop1p2
brw-rw—-  1 root disk 252,  7 Oct 24 12:39 loop1p3

Usually, the first partition represents /boot, so we can now mount it and work on it:

mount /dev/mapper/loop1p1 /mnt

All we need to do is edit /mnt/grub/menu.lst to match our requirements, and then wrap everything back up:

umount /mnt

kpartx -u /dev/loop1

losetup -d /dev/loop1

We don’t have to change the LV to offline, because the XenServer will activate it if it’s not, however, we could do it, to be on the safe side:

lvchange -an /dev/VG_XenStorage-4aa20fc2-fd92-20c2-c549-bed2597c622b/LV-90524af4-5b20-4412-9bfe-f1fe27f220b1

Now we can activate the VM, and see it boot successfully.

This whole process takes several minutes the first time, and even less later.

I hope this helps.

It has been a long while, I know. I was busy with life, work and everything around it. Not much worth mentioning.

This, however, is something else.

I have discovered an issue with Citrix XenServer 5.0 (probably the case with 5.5, but I have other issues with that release) using NetApp through NetApp API SR – Any non XenServer-generated snapshot will be deleted as soon as any snapshot-related action would be performed on that volume. Meaning that if I had manually created a snapshot called “1111″ (short and easy to recognize, especially with all these UUID-based volumes, LUNs and snapshot names XenServer uses…), the next time anyone would create a snapshot of a machine which has a disk (VDI) on this specific volume, the snapshot, my snapshot, “1111″ will be removed under that specific volume. The message seen in /var/log/SMlog would look like this:

Removing unused snap (1111)

While under normal operation, this does not matter much, as non-XenServer snapshots have little value, when using NetApp SnapMirror technology, the mechanism works a bit differently.

It appears that the SnapMirror system takes snapshots with predefined names (non-XenServer UUID type, luckily for us all). These snapshots include the entire changes performed since the last SnapMirror snapshots, and are used for replication. Unfortunately, XenServer deletes them. No SnapMirror snapshots, well, this is quite obvious, is it not? No SnapMirror…

We did not detect this problem immediately, and I should take the blame for that. I had to define a set of simple trial and error tests, as described above, instead of battling with a system I did not quite follow at that time – NetApp SnapMirror. Now I do, however, and I have this wonderful insight which can make your personal life, if you had issues with SnapMirror and XenServer, and did not know how to make it work, better. This solution cannot be an official one, due to its nature, which you will understand shortly. This is a personal patch for your pleasure, based on the hard fact that SnapMirror uses a predefined name for its snapshots. This name, in my case, is the name of the DR storage device. You must figure out what name is being used as part of the snapshot naming convention on your own site. Search for my ‘storagedr’ phrase, and replace it with yours.

This is the diff file for /opt/xensource/sm/NETAPPSR.py . Of course – back up your original file. Also – this is not an official patch. It was tested to function correctly on XenServer 5.0, and it will not work on XenServer 5.5 (since NETAPPSR.py is different). Last warning – it might break on the next update or upgrade you have for your XenServer environment, and if that happens, you better monitor your SnapMirror status closely then.

400,403c400,404
<                     util.SMlog("Removing unused snap (%s)" % val)
<                     out = netapplib.fvol_snapdelete_wrapper(self.sv, val, volname)
<                     if not na_test_result(out):
<                         pass
---
> 		    if 'storagedr' not in val:
>                     	util.SMlog("Removing unused snap (%s)" % val)
>                     	out = netapplib.fvol_snapdelete_wrapper(self.sv, val, volname)
>                     	if not na_test_result(out):
>                         	pass

Hope it helps!

XenServer is a wonderful tool. One of the better parts of it is its powerful scripting language, powered by the ‘xe’ command.

In order to capture a mass of snapshots, you can either do it manually from the GUI, or scripted. The script supplied below will include shell functions to capture Quiesce snapshots, and it that fails, normal snapshots of every running VM on the system.

Reason: NetApp SnapMirror, or other backup (maybe for later export) scheduled actions.

#!/bin/bash
# This script will supply functions for snapshotting and snapshot destroy including disks
# Written by Ez-Aton
# Visit my web blog for more stuff, at http://run.tournament.org.il
 
# Global variables:
UUID_LIST_FILE=/tmp/SNAP_UUIDS.txt
 
# Function
function assign_all_uuids () {
	# Construct artificial non-indexed list with name (removing annoying characters) and UUID
	LIST=""
	for UUID in `xe vm-list power-state=running is-control-domain=false | grep uuid | awk '{print $NF}'`
	do
		NAME=`xe vm-param-get param-name=name-label uuid=$UUID | tr ' ' _ | tr -d '(' | tr -d ')'`
		LIST="$LIST $NAME:$UUID"
	done
	echo $LIST
}
 
function take_snap_quiesce () {
	# We attempt to take a snapshot with quench
	# Arguments: $1 name ; $2 uuid
	# We attempt to snapshot the machine and set the value of snap_uuid to the snapshot uuid, if successful.
	# Return 1 if failed
 
	if SNAP_UUID=`xe vm-snapshot-with-quiesce vm=$2 new-name-label=${1}_snapshot`
	then
		# echo "Snapshot-with-quiesce for $1 successful"
		return 0
	else
		echo "Snapshot-with-quiesce for $1 failed"
		return 1
	fi
}
 
function take_snap () {
	# We attempt to take a snapshot
	# Arguments: $1 name ; $2 uuid
	# We attempt to snapshot the machine and set the value of snap_uuid to the snapshot uuid, if successful.
	# Return 1 if failed
 
	if SNAP_UUID=`xe vm-snapshot vm=$2 new-name-label=${1}_snapshot`
	then
		#echo "Snapshot for $1 successful"
		echo $SNAP_UUID
		return 0
	else
		echo "Snapshot-with-quiesce for $1 failed"
		return 1
	fi
}
 
function stop_ha_template () {
	# Templates inherit their settings from the origin
	# We need to turn off HA
	# $1 : Template UUID
	if [ -z "$1" ]
	then
		echo "Missing template UUID"
		return 1
	fi
	xe template-param-set ha-always-run=false uuid=$1
}
 
function get_vdi () {
	# This function will get a space delimited list of VDI UUIDs of a given snapshot/template UUID
	# Arguments: $1 template UUID
	# It will also verify that each VBD is an actual snapshot
	if [ -z "$1" ]
	then
		echo "No arguments? We need the template UUID"
		return 1
	fi
	VDIS=""
	for VBD in `xe vbd-list vm-uuid=$1 | grep ^uuid | awk '{print $NF}'`
	do
		echo "VBD: $VBD"
		if [ ! `xe vbd-param-get param-name=type uuid=$VBD` = "CD" ]
		then
			CUR_VDI=`xe vdi-list vbd-uuids=$VBD | grep ^uuid | awk '{print $NF}'`
			if `xe vdi-param-get uuid=$CUR_VDI param-name=is-a-snapshot`
			then
				VDIS="$VDIS $CUR_VDI"
			else
				echo "VDI is not a snapshot!"
				return 1
			fi
			CUR_VDI=""
		fi
	done
	echo $VDIS
}
 
function remove_vdi () {
	# This function will get a list of VDIs and remove them
	# Carefull!
	for VDI in $@
	do
		if xe vdi-destroy uuid=$VDI
		then
			echo "Success in removing VDI $VDI"
		else
			echo "Failure in removing VDI $VDI"
			return 1
		fi
	done
}
 
function remove_template () {
	# This funciton will remove a template
	# $1 template UUID
	if [ -z "$1" ]
	then
		echo "Required UUID"
		return 1
	fi
	xe template-param-set is-a-template=false uuid=$1
	if ! xe vm-uninstall force=true uuid=$1
	then
		echo "Failure to remove VM/Template"
		return 1
	fi
}
 
function remove_all_template () {
	# This function will completely remove a template
	# The steps are as follow:
	# $1 is the UUID of the template
	# Calculate its VDIs
	# Remove the template
	# Remove the VDIs
	if [ -z "$1" ]
	then
		echo "No Template UUID was supplied"
		return 1
	fi
	# We now collect the value of $VDIS
	get_vdi $1
	if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]
	then
		echo "Failed to get VDIs for Template $1"
		return 1
	fi
	if ! remove_template $1
	then
		echo "Failure to remove template $1"
		return 1
	fi
	if ! remove_vdi $VDIS
	then
		return 1
	fi
}
 
function create_all_snapshots () {
	# In this function we will run all over $LIST and create snapshots of each machine, keeping the UUID of it inside a file
	# $@ - list of machines in the $LIST format
	if [ -f $UUID_LIST_FILE ]
	then
		mv $UUID_LIST_FILE $UUID_LIST_FILE.$$
	fi
	for i in $@
	do
		SNAP_UUID=`take_snap_quiesce ${i%%:*} ${i##*:}`
		if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]
		then
			echo "Problem taking snapshot with quiesce for ${i%%:*}"
			echo "Attempting normal snapshot"
			SNAP_UUID=`take_snap ${i%%:*} ${i##*:}`
			if [ "$?" -ne "0" ]
                	then
                        	echo "Problem taking snapshot for ${i%%:*}"
				SNAP_UUID=""
			fi
		fi
		stop_ha_template $SNAP_UUID
		echo $SNAP_UUID >> $UUID_LIST_FILE
	done
}

Possible use will be like this:

. /usr/local/bin/xen_functions.sh

create_all_snapshots `assign_all_uuids` &> /tmp/snap_create.log

This sounds weird, but I have witnessed it today, and had to work rather hard to figure the cause of the problem.

When using ” Intel Corporation 82575EB Gigabit Network Connection (rev 02)” (as lspci reports), TCP offload causes problems.

Symptoms:

• The host can communicate with the guest flawlessly (including HTTP get for larger than 2.6k files)
• Other external hosts/guests report NFS timeout during mount attempt
• Other external hosts/guests take a long while running “showmount -e” on the target guest
• Pings work flawlessly
• HTTP get from external nodes halts at about 2660 bytes, to which it reaches almost immediately
• VLAN tagged interfaces on other than the default VLAN (1) do not experience these problems (cause – unknown to me at the moment).

The solution is simple – disable the offload from the NIC, and be happy. You could do it using the following line:

ethtool -K eth0 tx off

This should do the trick. It is required only on Dom0, and was tested to work well with my own method of configuring bonds and VLAN tags, as described in this post.

I was able to find the required hint in this post, under comment by Alejandro Anadon, and from there, directly to Xen’s FAQ site and to the  solution mentioned above.

Due to ETHTOOL_OPTS parameter limitations, I have placed (in an ugly manner, I know) the relevant ethtool commands in /etc/rc.local – in contradiction to this great article which shows the correct way of doing this action. Seems to be solved since.

Most documentation on the net is about how to run a cluster-in-a-box under Vmware. Very few seem to care about protecting Vmware guests under real RedHat cluster with a shared storage.

This article is just about it. While I would not recommend using Vmware in such a setup, it has been the case, and that Vmware guest actually resides on the shared storage. To relocate it is out of the question, so migrating it together with other resources is the only valid option.

To do so, I have created a simple script which will accept start/stop/status arguments. The Vmware guest VMX is hard-coded into the script, but in an easy-to-change format. This script will attempt to freeze the Vmware guest, and only if it fails, to shut it down. Mind you that the blog’s HTML formatting might alter quotation marks into UTF-8 marks which will not be understood well by shell.

#!/bin/bash
# This script will start/stop/status VMware machine
# Written by Ez-Aton
# http://www.tournament.org.il/run
 
# Hardcoded. Change to match your own settings!
VMWARE="/export/vmware/hosts/Windows_XP_Professional/Windows XP Professional.vmx"
VMRUN="/usr/bin/vmrun"
TIMEOUT=60
 
function status () {
  # This function will return success if the VM is up
  $VMRUN list | grep "$VMWARE" &>/dev/null
  if [[ "$?" -eq "0" ]]
  then
    echo "VM is up"
    return 0
  else
    echo "VM is down"
    return 1
  fi
}
 
function start () {
  # This function will start the VM
  $VMRUN start "$VMWARE"
  if [[ "$?" -eq "0" ]]
  then
    echo "VM is starting"
    return 0
  else
    echo "VM failed"
    return 1
  fi
}
 
function stop () {
  # This function will stop the VM
  $VMRUN suspend "$VMWARE"
  for i in `seq 1 $TIMEOUT`
  do
    if status
    then
      echo
    else
      echo "VM Stopped"
      return 0
    fi
    sleep 1
  done
  $VMRUN stop "$VMWARE" soft
}
 
case "$1" in
start)     start
        ;;
stop)      stop
        ;;
status)   status
        ;;
esac
RET=$?
 
exit $RET

Since the formatting is killed by the blog, you can find the script here: vmware1

I intend on building a “real” RedHat Cluster agent script, but this should do for the time being.

Enjoy!