While searching the web for how to perform PCI-Passthrough on XenServers, we mostly get info about previous versions. Since I have just completed setting up PCI-Passthrough on XenServer version 6. 5 (with recent update 8, just to give you some notion of the exact time frame), I am sharing it here. Hardware: Cisco UCS blades,…
I love XenServer. I love the product, I believe it to be a very good answer for SMBs, and enterprises. It lacks on external support, true, but the price tag for many of the ‘external capabilities’ on VMware, for instance, are very high, so many SMBs, especially, learn to live without them. XenServer gives a…
There is a very nice script for Windows dealing with attaching XenServer USB disk to a guest. It can be found here. This script has several problems, as I see it. The first – this is a Windows batch script, which is a very limited language, and it can handle only a single VDI disk…
In the past I hacked around a problem with the order of starting (and with several bugs) a network stack combined of network bonding (teaming) + VLAN tagging, and then with network bridging (aka – Xen bridges). This kind of setup is very useful for introducing VLAN networks to guest VMs. This works well on…
Unlike previous versions, VMs do not have a visible property in the GUI allowing autostart. This has been claimed to collide with the HA function of the licensed version. While I believe there is a more elegant way of doing that (like – ignoring this property if HA is enabled), the following method can allow…
DRBD is a low-cost shared-SAN-like solution, which has several great benefits, among which are no single point of failure, and very low cost (local storage and network cable). Its main disadvantages are in the need to constantly monitor it, and make sure it does what’s expected. Also – in some cases – performance might be affected greatly….
