Dell emc scaleio scale and performance for citrix xenserver. So recently i deployed 3 xenserver 6 hosts with local storage only. Hypervisor hardware compatibility list this site lists all the hardware components currently certified and supported for use with citrix hypervisor. Reflinking is no longer experimental and is on by default for xfs filesystem. How to enable thin provisioning on xenserver intelligent. For information on configuring local ext3 storage, refer to local ext3 in citrix xenserver administrators guide. Plenty has remained the same but there are also some useful new additions to this latest release. Understanding how thin provision works in xenserver storage.
Thin provisioning allows the administrator to present more storage space to the vms connecting to the storage repository sr than is actually available on. Our need was to virtualize approx 6 very old centos qa servers running on ancient hardware. Before creating the vdisks you should think about where you want to store them and if it might be wise to use thin provisioned storage. Here are the steps i followed to get a working usb stick.
With thin provisioning, no space is lost because the spare 370 gb is able to be used for other purposes. Citrix personal vdisk a personalized static desktop. One of these is in charge of running the rest of the system, and is known as domain 0, or dom0. And the xcpngxenserver storage stack relies on it quite a bit. Cloudstack8004 xenserver thin provisioning asf jira. Xenserver and other xapi based xen variants openstack.
It is the first domain to boot after xen, and owns the storage and networking hardware, the device drivers, and the primary control software. There are many locations from which xenserver itself can be installed. A while back i posted an article on updating xenserver 6. Personally, id like to see support for pnfs parallel nfs. Thin provisioning must be enabled in order for xendesktop local caching to work properly. Enabling thin provisioning on a volume decreases the amount of space allocated to the volume the reported size will be greater than the volume reserve. It depends on what type of storage your server is using. Comprehensive application and desktop hypervisor management platform citrix hypervisor is the most highly optimized hypervisor platform for citrix virtual apps and desktops workloads.
Call citrix support, or look it up for yourself in the documentation if you need a. This has the benefit of providing thin provisioning with the drawback is that you cant expand this storage easily. To ensure that a servers complete system configuration is fully supported, all individual hardware components must also be validated as. A good analogy of thin provisioned storage is a file divider it may start with no files in it but as you add more and more files, it. Ext and lvm local storage in xenserver randy\s blog. Fastest way to updating xenserver tools and pvs drivers on a citrix provisioning image posted on september 11, 2012 by magnar johnsen 41 comments v whenever there is an updated version of citrix provisioning target device driver or xenserver tools, you have to go through reverse imaging on each image to update the drivers. Having carefully considered what features are in each edition, weve taken the decision to move some features out of the free edition, and into standard. Hi all, im quite confused about xenservers thin provision feature. We could also modify the ext3 driver but we didnt want that.
However, we do not support volume groups spanning different. However, the default storage repository type is lvm as it gives a consistent write performance and, prevents storage overcommit. Top troubleshooting tips and techniques for citrix. You can use the new storage repository wizard in xencenter to create.
Converting an existing host to use thin provisioning 21. Using starwind iscsi storage for xenserver part 2, thin. However the xenserver install did not detect this secondary logical disk. If you do a clean install of xen, make sure to choose thin provisioning. On a new xenserver deployment ext storage is default. The following instructions work for an englishbased installation of xenserver and in the case of ext3based sr with which the resize functionality is known to work correctly. Be sure to check the minimum hardware requirements to ensure that the machine can support xenserver 7. Please refer to the sections below detailing citrix hypervisor features by product edition and release type. I recently had to configure 5 xenserver hosts and install xenserver 6. Whenever i do this, spiceworks winds up creating a duplicate vm in my assets which needs cleaned up. Below is a quick and easy method to create a bootable xenserver usb drive from windows. I am unable to provision instances including systemvmtemplates on xenserver srs that are configured with the thin attribute specified. I finally got time to upgrade our xenserver environment to 5.
Vm cloning through templates, accelerating provision and deployment of new vms. We know that thin provisioning does not work on block storage lvm local disk, iscsi, fc, fcoe. And the data which the daemon received should be transfer to an. How can i perform mass provisioning of debian guest vms on. Change the driver for the network card optional the default driver in xenserver that gets loaded for the realtek network card r8169 produces packet loss under some circumstances.
Xenserver is a great choice of hypervisor for openstack based clouds, but there is no native integration between it and redhats rdo packages. The windows pv driver subproject is developing these drivers under xen project governance. I have taken my lab environment with 100 gb local storage type ext3 and am going to increase this to 200gb initial output without the increasing the size of local storage from backend please take a snippet of this screen as it contains the sector startend values. Without thin provisioning, 370 gb of expensive hard drive space would be lost. With xencenter guest vm provisioning, we could create a custom template from the specific version of debian we want to use, specify the install media. The first step occurs during the installation of xenserver itself, where you select enable thin provisioning optimized storage for xendesktop.
Note that in future versions of xensevrer, there is high likelihood that thin provisioning will also be supported on blockbased devices under lvm. The current iso from citrix last time i checked was the xenserver 5. Changing xenserver from lvm sr to ext sr server fault. Enabling intellicache during installation is easy, just put a checkmark when asked enable thin provisioning.
You create the size vm disk that you want and it will only use the actual storage on the backend. In xenserver, thin provisioning is possible using local storage if you make sure to set the local disks to ext3 format. In this article, we see how to setup thin provisioning volumes in lvm. Nfsext3 is always thin provisioned, lvm doesnt matter over what is. By default, a new sr in xenserver will be formatted in lvm, which does not support thin provisioning. When carrying out vm lifecycle operations such as vm create and suspendresume. So if you add an sr and you dont explicitly specify ext3, your disk will default to thick provisioning.
I havnt had time to solve this issuse yet, will post a. Fastest way to updating xenserver tools and pvs drivers on a citrix provisioning image posted on september 11, 2012 by magnar johnsen whenever there is an updated version of citrix provisioning target device driver or xenserver tools, you have to go through reverse imaging on each image to update the drivers. Pvsaccelerator the integration of a xenserver provisioning services pvs host cache dramatically reduces solution network traffic, enabling fewer pvs servers to handle the same. Increase the size of ext3 local storage on xenserver.
Explore the citrix hypervisor feature matrix citrix india. Understanding how thin provision works in xenserver. I have attached one of the best papers i am aware of on the subject, specific to xenserver, which i hope will be of help. Although ext is nice ability to manipulate raw vhd files and use sparse storage, lvm is faster and more stable. At least lvm needs, since i dont use ext3thin provisioning, due to the nature. If the setup is already completed and you are using only local sr. Uploaded on 42019, downloaded 349 times, receiving a 85100 rating by 149 users. Using ext3 enables thin provisioning on local storage. Solved shared storage for a xenserver pool spiceworks. This project has taken the the xenserver windows pv drivers, rewritten them and contributed them to the xen project. Generally speaking, weather you are taking about a storage area network or local storage i. One of the reasons to do this, is to make the drivers more easily signable and distributable via the windows driver update mechanism.
Note that support for servers listed are for the server model only and may not include support for additional hardware. The other sr types ext3, nfs, gfs2 support full thin provisioning. Fastest way to updating xenserver tools and pvs drivers on. Since i did not have any dedicated networksan storage at my disposal i stuck 6, 146 sas drives in each server and carved them up into a 410gb raid 10 array. Obviously, as soon you use snapshot functionality, a thin provisioned sr is. This option will change the default local storage type from lvm to ext3. Setup thin provisioning volumes in logical volume management. Ive been caught out though my quick tip relies on the module name matching the driver disk filename which works in all but one instance. Citrix said that support for thin provisioning on block storage for virtual disk. When you copy a vm from one storage to another, and plan to use this new copy, ensure that you manually change the mac address on the interface to the one that was used previously. One of the biggest changes is the upgrade to the underlying dom0 environment. There are a number of tools for provisioning physical and virtual servers, but i cant see a well documented solution for provisioning xenserver debian guests, apart from using xencenter itself. A xen host runs a number of virtual machines, vms, or domains the terms are synonymous on xen.
Therefore, it can be replaced with a different driver. It is very common situation that server hardware as a standard option is configured without optical drive. In may 2016, citrix released the new version of the xenserver platform. This means that setting up an integrated environment using xenserver and rdo is more difficult than it should be. Thin provisioning changes the default local storage type of the host from lvm to ext3. Because snapshot reserve, local replication reserve, and replica reserve space are all based on a percentage of the volume reserve, enabling and disabling thin provisioning will also affect. Basically it thin provisions the storage array instead of the vm files. I forgot enable enable thin provisioning optimized storage for.
Citrix announced general availability of xenserver 7. If i recall correctly, and i may not, thin provisioning is a bit different in xenserver. Xenserver will then format the local disk as ext3 instead of lvm. Take backup of all the vms that are residing on the local storage before making below changes note. I want to develop a daemon which can communicate with some client using internet. Any nfs or ext3 based file system will automatically be thin provisioned. Huawei san storage host connectivity guide for xenserver huawei. For storage subsystems that do not inherently support advanced. Xenserver makes thin provisioning available to customers using.
I forgot enable enable thin provisioning optimized. Install the appropriate multipathing driver for your host system to enable the management of multiple paths to storwize v3700 system volumes. It will create a virtual disk starting at just a few bytes and once i start installing the os and adding data, the disk will grow. It should work on host os of virtual machines like xenserver. If i recreate the sr not thin provisioned there are no issues. But what we do in thin provisioning is, we use to define a thin pool inside one of the large. In short, if you choose to deploy vdi on scaleio using xenserver, you will have to use thick clones for all vms. I forgot enable thin provisioning optimized storage for. This release also delivers usb passthrough, thin provisioning for block storage experimental, and passthrough of. If you use ext3, you might see reduced performance in the following cases. Xenserver pv network device driver for windows 7 32 bit, windows 7 64 bit, windows 10, 8, xp.
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