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.

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.

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.

The simple scripts in /etc/xen/scripts which manage networking are fine for most usages, however, when your server is using bonding together with VLAN tagging (802.11q) you should consider an alternative.

A PDF document written by Mark Nielsen, GPS Senior Consultant, Red Hat, Inc (I lost the original link, sorry) named “BOND/VLAN/Xen Network Configuration” as a service to the community, game me few insights on the subject. Following one of its references, I saw a bit more elegant method of doing a bridging setup under RedHat, which takes managing the bridges away from xend, and leaves it at the system level. Lets see how it’s done on RedHat style Linux distribution.

Manage your normal networking configurations

If you’re using VLAN tagging over bonding, than you should have to setup a bonding device (be it bond0) which has definitions such as this:

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
MASTER=bond0
SLAVE=yes
ISALIAS=no

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0

DEVICE=bond0
BOOTPROTO=none
BONDING_OPTS=”mode=1 miimon=100″
ONBOOT=yes

This is rather stright-forward, and should be rather a default for such a setup. Now comes the more interesting part. Originally, the next configuration part would be bond0.2 and bond0.3 (in my example). The original configuration would have looked like this (this is in bold because I tend to fast-read myself, and tend to miss things too often). This is not how it should look when we’re done!

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0.2 (same applies to ifcfg-bond0.3)

DEVICE=bond0.2
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=192.168.0.2
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
ONBOOT=yes
VLAN=yes

Configure bridging

To setup a bridge device for bond0.2, replace the mentioned above ifcfg-bond0.2 with this new /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0.2

DEVICE=bond0.2
BOOTPROTO=static
ONBOOT=yes
VLAN=yes
BRIDGE=xenbr0

Now, create a new file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-xenbr0

DEVICE=xenbr0
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=192.168.0.2
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=bridge

Now, on network restart, the bridge will be brought up, holding the right IP address – all done by initscripts, with no Xen intervention. You will want to repeat the last the “Configure bridge” part for any additional bridge you want to be enabled for Xen machines.

Don’t let Xen bring any bridges up

This is the last part of our drill, and it is very important. If you don’t do it, you’ll get a nice networking mess. As said before, Xen (community), by default, can’t handle bondings or vlan tags, so it will attempt to create or modify bridges to eth0 or the likes. Edit /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp and remark any line containing a directive containing starting with “network-script“. Such a directive would be, for example

(network-script network-bridge)

Restart xend and restart networking. You should now be able to configure VMs to use xenbr0 and xenbr1, etc (according to your own personal settings).

Unlike VMware Server, Xen’s HyperVisor does not allow an easy collection of performance information. The management machine, called “Domain-0″ is actually a privileged virtual machine, and thus – get its own small share of CPUs and RAM. Collecting performance information on it will lead to, well, collecting performance information for a single VM, and not the whole bunch.

Local tools, such as “xentop” allows collection of information, however, combining this with Cacti, or any other SNMP-based collection tool is a bit tricky.

A great solution is provided by Ian P. Christian in his blog post about Xen monitoring. He has created a Perl script to collect information. I have taken the liberty to fix several minor things with his permission. The modified scripts are presented below. Name the script (according to your version of Xen) “/usr/local/bin/xen_stats.pl” and set it to be executable:

For Xen 3.1

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
 
use strict;
 
# declare...
sub trim($);
#<a href="/blog/files/xen_cloud.tar.gz" title="xen_cloud.tar.gz" target="_blank">xen_cloud.tar.gz</a>
# we need to run 2 iterations because CPU stats show 0% on the first, and I'm putting .1 second betwen them to speed it up
my @result = split(/\n/, `xentop -b -i 2 -d.1`);
 
# remove the first line
shift(@result);
 
shift(@result) while @result && $result[0] !~ /^xentop - /;
 
# the next 3 lines are headings..
shift(@result);
shift(@result);
shift(@result);
shift(@result);
 
foreach my $line (@result)
{
  my @xenInfo = split(/[\t ]+/, trim($line));
  printf("name: %s, cpu_sec: %d, cpu_percent: %.2f, vbd_rd: %d, vbd_wr: %d\n",
    $xenInfo[0],
    $xenInfo[2],
    $xenInfo[3],
    $xenInfo[14],
    $xenInfo[15]
    );
}
 
# trims leading and trailing whitespace
sub trim($)
{
  my $string = shift;
  $string =~ s/^\s+//;
  $string =~ s/\s+$//;
  return $string;
}

For Xen 3.2 and Xen 3.3

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
 
use strict;
 
# declare…
sub trim($);
 
# we need to run 2 iterations because CPU stats show 0% on the first, and I’m putting .1 second between them to speed it up
my @result = split(/\n/, `/usr/sbin/xentop -b -i 2 -d.1`);
 
# remove the first line
shift(@result);
shift(@result) while @result && $result[0] !~ /^[\t ]+NAME/;
shift(@result);
 
foreach my $line (@result)
{
        my @xenInfo = split(/[\t ]+/, trim($line));
        printf(“name: %s, cpu_sec: %d, cpu_percent: %.2f, vbd_rd: %d, vbd_wr: %d\n“,
        $xenInfo[0],
        $xenInfo[2],
        $xenInfo[3],
        $xenInfo[14],
        $xenInfo[15]
        );
}
# trims leading and trailing whitespace
sub trim($)
{
        my $string = shift;
        $string =~ s/^\s+//;
        $string =~ s/\s+$//;
        return $string;
}

Cron settings for Domain-0

Create a file “/etc/cron.d/xenstat” with the following contents:

# This will run xen_stats.pl every minute
*/1 * * * * root /usr/local/bin/xen_stats.pl > /tmp/xen-stats.new && cat /tmp/xen-stats.new > /var/run/xen-stats

SNMP settings for Domain-0

Add the line below to “/etc/snmp/snmpd.conf” and then restart the snmpd service

extend xen-stats   /bin/cat /var/run/xen-stats

Cacti

I reduced Ian Cacti script to be based on a per-server setup, meaning this script gets the host (dom-0) name from Cacti, but cannot support live migrations. I will try to deal with combining live migrations with Cacti in the future.

Download and extract my modified xen_cloud.tar.gz file. Extract it, place the script and config in its relevant location, and import the template into Cacti. It should work like charm.

A note – the PHP script will work only on PHP5 and above. Works flawlessly on Centos5.2 for me.

Doesn’t work. It will work fine up to the step where you actually try to active one of the VMware virtual machines. And then your kernel will panic.

Works fine without Xen kernel (but without Xen, of course). Pity.

Was tested on Centos5.1 64bit.