XenServer 5.6 experiences and FAQs

BKJIA exclusive Article] XenServer 5.6 I have been using it for quite a while, and I feel good stability and performance, so now we have changed all the virtual machines in the company's internal machine room to XenServer 5.6. Of course, the original FreeBSD jail is not converted because it is used well ), I also installed XenServer 5.6, removed the display, keyboard, and mouse, installed two CentOS 5.5 x86_64 servers, and debugged some SHELL and Python scripts, it is also very convenient. Next I will share with you some of the experiences of XenServer 5.6:

I. How is the hardware compatibility of XenServer 5.6?

The general PC actually supports XenServer 5.6, and its compatibility is very good. Friends With 64-bit CPU architecture can try to see if their PC supports XenServer 5.6, back up hard disk data before installation.

1. Enable XenServer to support general PC onboard NICs

If you need to install XenServer on a common PC in the previous XenServer version, you need to add a PCI slot Nic separately. We recommend that you use an Intel or 3COM chip Nic ). However, XenServer 5.6 is compatible with each other. I have successfully installed my host computers on both angda and Asus. If you are worried about Nic, you can prepare an intel 8139 plug-and-play Nic;

2, install XenServer ordinary pc cpu must support 64-bit and virtualization Intel VT or AMD-V functions, and need to enable this function on the motherboard BIOS, This is not to mention, this is the foundation of Xen virtual technology;

3. The previous XenServer version requires an old hard disk, and the new XenServer 5.6 does not pick a hard disk. The latest SATA2 hard disk is successfully installed.

4. You do not need to install an independent database when installing XenCenter on the remote console of XenServer 5.6, but it requires an independent host. You can install the XenCenter console in this document. NET Framwork 2.0 or later. I downloaded the. NET Framwork 3.5 file from the sky software for installation.

2. How can I view host XenServer 5.6 and Its VM machine information?

On the XenCenter of the Free graphical Management Console of XenServer 5.6, you can view the host machine and various information and related icons of all running VMS on the host machine, such as the number of CPUs, memory size, disk, nic and related utilization.

In addition, XenServer 5.6 itself can use Linux commands to view its specific information. The host installed with XenServer 5.6 is actually a Linux host. We can use commands such as uname to view its details:

[root@localhost ~0m]# uname -r2.6.32.12-0.7.1.xs5.6.100.307.170586xen[root@localhost ~0m]# lsb_release -aLSB Version::core-3.1-ia32:core-3.1-noarchDistributor ID:XenServerDescription:XenServer release 5.6.100-39215p (xenenterprise)Release:5.6.100-39215pCodename:xenenterprise

Therefore, since XenServer 5.6 itself is a Linux machine, we can use Linux to view load commands and disk IO commands to monitor its performance, such as uptime, top, vmstat, and iostat. Of course, these commands can only view the resources occupied by XenServer 5.6, and cannot view other VM machines.

[root@localhost ~0m]# free -m             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cachedMem:           300        285         14          0        150         32-/+ buffers/cache:        102        197Swap:          511          0        511[root@localhost ~0m]# df -hFilesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on/dev/sda1             4.0G  1.7G  2.2G  44% /none                  380M     0  380M   0% /dev/shm/opt/xensource/packages/iso/XenCenter.iso                       44M   44M     0 100% /var/xen/xc-install//192.168.1.100/ISO    41G   14G   27G  35% /var/run/sr-mount/efedab53-c882-fe17-f3ed-95f1dd31639c

The preceding command shows that XenServer 5.6 only occupies 4G hard drive and M memory of the entire system.

3. How to configure VM auto-start?

We can use "Auto-start on server boot" in the "Starup Options" option of the VM property item, as shown in Figure 1-1:

4. What if XenServer 5.6 prompts that the hard disk cannot be found?

This problem is well solved. We do not need to install the system according to the template that comes with XenServer 5.6. We can select "other install media" for installation. For example, the built-in template of XenServer 5.6 does not have the Debian series. Debian can only be installed using the other install media option.

5. How does a physical Nic of XenServer 5.6 work?

In addition to managing NICs, physical NICs on XenServer do not need to configure IP information. It works in the bridge mode and provides a communication channel. The virtual Nic of a virtual machine communicates with the outside world through it, the virtual network card with the same physical network card load can be configured with different network segments, VLANs, and so on, just like in our current environment, there is no difference. If both XenServer 5.6 and the client use a firewall to route the internet, you only need one network card. Of course, we recommend XenServer 5.6 to use a gigabit network card.

6. How does XenServer 5.6 enable the vmvm to achieve high I/O performance?

In XenServer 5.6, the Linux vmvm directly uses the Linux driver, which is similar to the traditional PC mode. After the Windows vmvm is installed, xen tools must be installed to replace the original simulated driver to improve IO efficiency. In addition, if a physical server runs multiple virtual machines, we recommend that you use storage to greatly improve storage efficiency. It should be emphasized that XenServer 5.6 provides the new function Storagelink to help virtual machines directly use the advanced features of storage, which can greatly improve IO performance.

7. How do I plan A vmvm? Is there a quantitative standard?

This depends entirely on the configuration of the Virtual Machine and the load pressure. A simple configuration method is to allocate memory according to the memory. The memory allocation volume of each virtual machine + XenServer memory = physical server memory, so this is a good description; I have installed two Centos5.5 x86_64 virtual machines with 5.6 GB hard drive and MB memory in my home XenServer. It is usually used to debug Shell and Python scripts, another step is to do experiments such as puppet, rsync + inotify, and perform master-slave MySQL replication when you are bored. I also use these two machines as my vsftpd backup machine, one is used as a backup of documents + software, and one is used as a backup of movie/TV dramas. For example, it is very convenient to add a set of Chinese and English Subtitles "friends" to exercise oral English.

Author profile: Yu hongchun blog), Community ID: fuqin liquor, Foreign Enterprise Linux/Unix System Administrator, project implementation engineer, ChinaUnix cluster and high-availability version moderator, he is good at Server Load balancer high availability and small and medium-sized securities and e-commerce website architectures. He is currently focusing on website architecture research and network security.