Xen.org Community Blog
A new python based migration utility for migrating your xend virtual machines to XCP is now available at:
http://www.xen.org/products/cloud_projects.html
It can generate XVAs from your xend based HVM and paravirtualised virtual machines.
It can also steam your VM directly to a XenServer/XCP host over HTTP or HTTPS.
Please read the README for pointers and guidelines on how to prepare your VMs for migration to XCP. Most PV based virtual machines will need some preparation work.
Posted in Cloud Xen, Community, Xen Development, Xen Migration, Xen.org Promotion.
– March 12, 2010
From Vincent Hanquez on xen-devel:
I’m please to announce the availability of repositories [1,2] for the xen cloud platform tools [3] on xen-unstable.
The goal of these repositories is to make compilation of the XCP platform toolstack:
Dependencies you need to have:
Compilation
Usability
At the moment the usability straight out of the repository is pretty low, as the XCP toolstack requires lots of various configurations and setting that are not joined. it is recommended to copy the setup of a properly configured XCP installation for getting started, until all the requirements are relaxed/made more generic/etc..
Please note that this is not as tested as the official XCP platform, so you should be careful when using those repositories, and they should be considered for development only. For stable installation please refer to [3]
Libxenlight integration
The goal is to integrate libxenlight into the XCP and XCI. until this works is fully done and stable, the xl work will stays separated from this work, nonetheless if you’re felling lucky or want to help, you can checkout the “unstable-xl” branch.
You can also find in [4] the equivalent effort related to the XCI project (branch unstable and unstable-xl)
[1] git://xenbits.xen.org/people/vhanquez/xcp-libs-unstable
[2] git://xenbits.xen.org/people/vhanquez/xcp-unstable
[3] http://www.xen.org/products/cloudxen.html
[4] git://xenbits.xen.org/people/vhanquez/xci-unstable
Posted in Cloud Xen, Community, Xen Development, Xen Support, Xen-API, Xen.org Promotion.
– March 12, 2010
From Dave Scott:
I’ve collected together a bunch of XCP-related project suggestions and stuck them on the xen wiki:
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XAPI_project_suggestions
The main idea is that new people who want to work on XCP can use this list for inspiration… each idea has a rough guesstimate of size/ knowledge required/ impact and an initial first contact (who either suggested the idea originally or who is willing to help someone work on it)
I think a good next step would be to expand the list
As always, comments and suggestions are welcome!
Posted in Cloud Xen, Community, Xen Development, Xen.org Promotion.
– March 12, 2010
From Keir on Tuesday (sorry about delay, I was on vacation)…
Folks,
‘4.0.0-rc6′ is now tagged at http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-unstable.hg
Pretty close now. Please test!
Posted in Community, Xen Development, Xen.org Promotion.
– March 12, 2010
Hannover, March 5, 2010 – Xen, Intel, AdBlock, Google Android, OpenStreetMap, and Linux kernel programmers were winners of the 10th annual Linux New Media Awards, presented last evening at the CeBIT 2010 conference in Hannover, Germany. A jury of approximately 300 experts from the open source community nominated the candidates for the prestigious award. An award panel consisting of members of the open source community, authors, journalists, agencies, and industry representatives selected the winners. Among the panel members were the prominent kernel hacker Alan Cox, Linux International director Jon ‘maddog’ Hall, Linux author Michael Kofler, open source veteran Bruce Perens, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, former openSUSE community manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, and Joe Casad, editor in chief of Linux Pro Magazine and Linux Magazine (international English edition).
The acting editor in chief of the German Linux Magazin, Markus Feilner, and the magazine’s publisher, Brian Osborn, moderated in English and German. They proceeded to honor the winners at the Open Source Forum in Hall 2 at CeBIT 2010, presenting awards in six categories:
Best Open Source Solution for Cloud Computing: Xen
Kai Dupke, senior product manager at Novell responsible for Linux, presented the award to the founder of the Xen project, Keir Fraser. Xen enables running multiple virtual machines on a single host. Xen began at Cambridge University and is being further developed primarily by Citrix.
Most Linux/Open Source-Friendly Hardware Vendor: Intel
For the second year the award for Most Linux/Open Source-friendly Hardware Vendor went to Intel, which is not only actively involved in Linux kernel development, but also intervenes in favor of open standards. Rico Barth, chairman of the LIVE Linux association in Germany and managing directory of C.a.p.e IT GmbH, handed the award to Wolfgang Rosenberg, business development manager of EMEA at the Intel Software and Services Group.
Best Open Source Firefox Extension: AdBlock
Winner in this newly established category was the AdBlock extension, created by Wladimir Palant. Presenting the honor to Palant, who made a special trip from the Netherlands to accept the award, was Mozilla director of special programs Chris Hofmann.
Best Open Source Contribution to Mobile Devices: Google Android
The software platform for smartphones, mobile phones, and netbooks was honored for its breakthrough with Android version 2.0 over the past year. Knoppix founder Klaus Knopper handed the award to Ines Wesner, who accepted on behalf of Google Android developers.
Most Innovative Open Source Project: OpenStreetMap
Linux Magazin’s Markus Feilner didn’t deny himself the honor of conferring the Most Innovative Open Source Project award on a project that he has been following with some interest over the years. OpenStreetMap is a wiki project that generates a free world map that can be embedded without licensing fees in print, webpages, and applications such as navigation software. Sven Anders, a project and community member since day one, accepted the award.
Exceptional Contribution to Open Source/Linux/Free Software: Linux Kernel Programmers
The highpoint of the award ceremony was the award presented by Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, to the Linux kernel programmers. Representing the developer community and receiving the award was Hans-Joachim Picht, who has been working on furthering Linux platform development at the IBM Linux Technology Center in Boeblingen, Germany since 2006.
All award speeches and ceremonies were streamed live over the Internet from Techcast GmbH, and the live streaming video archives will be available soon on the Linux Magazin (German) and Linux Pro Magazine sites.
About Linux New Media AG
Linux New Media AG, founded in 1999, is currently the largest worldwide content provider for Linux and open source. The publishing house provides more than 30 print and online publications and has offices in five countries. In addition to Linux Pro Magazine, Linux Magazine, and Ubuntu User, Linux New Media AG produces German titles such as Linux Magazin, Linux Technical Review, LinuxUser, Ubuntu User, and EasyLinux, as well as independent editions in Spain, Poland, and Brazil. Linux New Media AG organizes events and conferences such as “CeBIT Open Source” and the “LinuxPark” series in Brazil.
Complete article available at http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Linux-New-Media-Awards-2010-Presented-at-CeBIT.
Posted in Community, Events, Partner Announcements, Xen.org Promotion.
– March 12, 2010
Welcome to the new Xen.org weekly newsletter with a variety of information to keep you updated on all things Xen. This newsletter is an upgrade from my previous weekly communications and is meant to offer a broader scope of Xen.org activities. Please feel free to contact me with suggestions for the newsletter.
There will be no newsletter next week as I will be sailing the Caribbean looking for treasure! The newsletter will return on Friday March 19 (unless I find buried treasure!).
Xen News
Xen Events
Xen Products
Xen Members in Action
Xen Weekly Stats
The complete newsletter with all data including the summary of all xen-users/xen-devel/xen-api mailing lists can be found at http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenUpdate20100305.
Posted in Community, Partner Announcements, Xen Development, Xen Support, Xen.org Promotion.
– March 5, 2010
Oracle just released its first updated for VirtualBox after the acquisition of Sun.
The list of bugs corrected in version 3.1.4 is long but there are no new features .
An interesting thing is that the company decided to change the default behavior of the engine: now VirtualBox tries to leverage hardware virtualization acceleration by default, and this includes both VPDI and nested paging, provided by Intel VT-x and AMD-V RVI enhancements.
Posted in Community, Partner Announcements.
– March 5, 2010
Nice blog posting from Open Source Zenoss at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SocializedSoftware/~3/tSQHqVWdS9s/.
This week I am very excited because we released Zenoss Core 2.5.2 with a cool new feature, Xen hypervisor monitoring.
I am very happy to see Zenoss put this out as open source software, because it’s the beginning of what could be a great piece of software. Now that this is out there for anyone to use I expect to get lots of feedback to extend and improve it.
This extension to Zenoss Core discovers guests on Xen para-virtualized hosts and provides monitoring of performance and availability via SSH. While the Xen hosts run on physical servers, the virtual guests are listed per host and linked back to any discovered instances on the network. Admins can quickly find the associated hosts and guests and monitor their Xen virtual infrastructure along side their entire physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT environment through a single interface.
I really think this is the beginning of a lot of virtualization and cloud monitoring capabilities from Zenoss Core. In recent weeks we got a couple neat extensions for virtualization and cloud monitoring including Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, libvirt (a virtualization library favored by Red Hat) and Ganglia integration.
Posted in Community, Partner Announcements, Xen.org Promotion.
– March 5, 2010
As the final part of this XCP tutorial, I wanted to add one more item that I discovered when booting up my HVM guest from a CD image. After complete all the memory and VM setup issues I got the following response to starting my new VM:
xe vm-start uuid=f0ddc908-79a9-ea0f-7a22-17c8c4bd983c
The bootloader returned an error vm: f0ddc908-79a9-ea0f-7a22-17c8c4bd983c (oracle_vm)
msg: Error from bootloader: Failed to parse the output of bootloader: ()
In this case, my VM tried to obtain its information from the CD but was not finding it. I ran the following command to profile my entire VM image,
xe vm-param-list uuid=f0ddc908-79a9-ea0f-7a22-17c8c4bd983c | grep HVM
HVM-boot-policy ( RW):
HVM-boot-params (MRW):
HVM-shadow-multiplier ( RW): 1.000
last-boot-record ( RO): ‘(’struct’ (‘uuid’ ‘f0ddc908-79a9-ea0f-7a22-17c8c4bd983c’) (‘allowed_operations’ (‘array’)) (‘current_operations’ (’struct’ (‘OpaqueRef:4f53e4c6-55dd-0b9a-b883-544943782288′ ’start’))) (‘power_state’ ‘Halted’) (‘name_label’ ‘oracle_vm’) (‘name_description’ ‘Installed via xe CLI’) (‘user_version’ ‘1′) (‘is_a_template’ (‘boolean’ ‘0′)) (’suspend_VDI’ ‘OpaqueRef:NULL’) (‘resident_on’ ‘OpaqueRef:NULL’) (‘affinity’ ‘OpaqueRef:NULL’) (‘memory_overhead’ ‘1048576′) (‘memory_target’ ‘512000000′) (‘memory_static_max’ ‘512000000′) (‘memory_dynamic_max’ ‘512000000′) (‘memory_dynamic_min’ ‘512000000′) (‘memory_static_min’ ‘512000000′) (‘VCPUs_params’ (’struct’)) (‘VCPUs_max’ ‘1′) (‘VCPUs_at_startup’ ‘1′) (‘actions_after_shutdown’ ‘destroy’) (‘actions_after_reboot’ ‘restart’) (‘actions_after_crash’ ‘restart’) (‘consoles’ (‘array’)) (‘VIFs’ (‘array’)) (‘VBDs’ (‘array’ ‘OpaqueRef:b6970f61-abdf-9ccb-2d98-94c01b571a3e’ ‘OpaqueRef:730588ba-f6f0-089e-ad86-e0930e3bcfd6′)) (‘crash_dumps’ (‘array’)) (‘VTPMs’ (‘array’)) (‘PV_bootloader’ ‘eliloader’) (‘PV_kernel’ ”) (‘PV_ramdisk’ ”) (‘PV_args’ ‘graphical utf8′) (‘PV_bootloader_args’ ”) (‘PV_legacy_args’ ”) (‘HVM_boot_policy’ ”) (‘HVM_boot_params’ (’struct’)) (‘HVM_shadow_multiplier’ (‘double’ ‘1′)) (‘platform’ (’struct’ (‘nx’ ‘false’) (‘acpi’ ‘true’) (‘apic’ ‘true’) (‘pae’ ‘true’) (‘viridian’ ‘true’))) (‘PCI_bus’ ”) (‘other_config’ (’struct’ (‘install-respository’ ‘cdrom’) (‘mac_seed’ ‘7328478f-c1e6-22d3-a856-c589537451f5′) (‘linux_template’ ‘true’) (‘machine-address-size’ ‘36′) (‘install-methods’ ‘cdrom,nfs,http,ftp’) (‘rhel5′ ‘true’) (‘install-distro’ ‘rhlike’))) (‘domid’ ‘-1′) (‘domarch’ ”) (‘last_boot_CPU_flags’ (’struct’)) (‘is_control_domain’ (‘boolean’ ‘0′)) (‘metrics’ ‘OpaqueRef:36a9d247-0c51-6cae-34ae-5db9bcae5108′) (‘guest_metrics’ ‘OpaqueRef:NULL’) (‘last_booted_record’ ”) (‘recommendations’ ‘<restrictions><restriction field=\”memory-static-max\” max=\”17179869184\” /><restriction field=\”vcpus-max\” max=\”8\” /><restriction property=\”number-of-vbds\” max=\”7\” /><restriction property=\”number-of-vifs\” max=\”7\” /></restrictions>’) (‘xenstore_data’ (’struct’)) (‘ha_always_run’ (‘boolean’ ‘0′)) (‘ha_restart_priority’ ”) (‘is_a_snapshot’ (‘boolean’ ‘0′)) (’snapshot_of’ ‘OpaqueRef:NULL’) (’snapshots’ (‘array’)) (’snapshot_time’ (‘dateTime.iso8601′ ‘19700101T00:00:00Z’)) (‘transportable_snapshot_id’ ”) (‘blobs’ (’struct’)) (‘tags’ (‘array’)) (‘blocked_operations’ (’struct’)) (’snapshot_info’ (’struct’)) (’snapshot_metadata’ ”) (‘parent’ ‘OpaqueRef:9ebdd1c5-2026-8773-7a06-0c36e67be3f0′) (‘children’ (‘array’)) (‘bios_strings’ (’struct’)))’
In the data above, it was clear that my HVM boot-policy had no setting so I updated that field with the following command:
xe vm-param-set uuid=f0ddc908-79a9-ea0f-7a22-17c8c4bd983c HVM-boot-policy=BIOS\ order HVM-boot-params:order=”dc”
From there, I was able to start my VM and leverage OpenXenCenter to run through the OS installation.
Final thoughts, I would like to thank Dave Scott from Citrix and Alberto González Rodríguez from OpenXenCenter for assisting me these past few days while I worked through the memory and CD issues. Hopefully, my experience and notes can be of use to someone else trying out XCP for the first time.
Posted in Cloud Xen, Xen Support, Xen.org Promotion.
– March 4, 2010
As a continuation on my previous XCP Tutorial, I wanted to share some experiences with memory problems that have been a hindrance in my successful installation of new VMs on XCP.
1) Too much memory is taken up in my local storage repository (SR) – with each attempt to create a new VM, memory is put aside on your machine, Virtual Disk Image (VDI), and if you don’t use the VM you will need to release that memory. I discovered that I had about 15 extra VDIs on my machine that was taking memory. Here is what I did:
a) Run xe sr-list type=lvm
RETURN:
uuid ( RO) : 07ec20ab-5088-67b1-50fe-a46cc689bc98
name-label ( RW): Local storage
name-description ( RW):
host ( RO): xenserver-reiazupz
type ( RO): lvm
content-type ( RO): user
b) Run xe vdi-list sr-uuid=07ec20ab-5088-67b1-50fe-a46cc689bc98
RETURN: ** In my case I had 15 different uuid (RO) that were listed, I only present 1 example
uuid ( RO) : f3ace49e-6afe-4d96-befb-3b86910ea4b0
name-label ( RW): 0
name-description ( RW): Created by template provisioner
sr-uuid ( RO): 07ec20ab-5088-67b1-50fe-a46cc689bc98
virtual-size ( RO): 8589934592
sharable ( RO): false
read-only ( RO): false
c) Run xe vdi-destroy uuid=xxx for each uuid (RO) that you wish to destroy
2) Not enough free memory to run the VM – each server only has so much available memory for each additional VM that you try and start. Here are some commands you can run to determine how much memory is available, how much memory your VM is requesting, and how you can adjust the VM memory request.
a) Determine Amount of Memory Available on Machine
Run xe host-compute-free-memory
RETURN: 664014848
In my example, I only had 664 MB of memory available for a new VM to run in
b) Determine Amount of Memory VM is requesting (use your VM uuid)
Run xe vm-param-list uuid=f0ddc908-79a9-ea0f-7a22-17c8c4bd983c | grep ” memory-”
RETURN:
memory-actual ( RO): 0
memory-target ( RO): 0
memory-overhead ( RO): 1048576
memory-static-max ( RW): 1073741824
memory-dynamic-max ( RW): 1073741824
memory-dynamic-min ( RW): 1073741824
memory-static-min ( RW): 536870912
In this example, my VM was requesting 1 GB of memory so I needed to adjust the VM memory sizes as I only had 664 MB available. The following commands allow you to update the memory for your individual VM.
c) Update VM Memory Requirements
Run these four commands in the order listed below for specfic VM uuid and in this example for 512 MB:
xe vm-param-set uuid=fc84c8f0-3be0-8b05-95db-966b9460d3ac memory-static-min=512000000
xe vm-param-set uuid=fc84c8f0-3be0-8b05-95db-966b9460d3ac memory-dynamic-min=512000000
xe vm-param-set uuid=fc84c8f0-3be0-8b05-95db-966b9460d3ac memory-dynamic-max=512000000
xe vm-param-set uuid=fc84c8f0-3be0-8b05-95db-966b9460d3ac memory-static-max=512000000
After these commands I checked my VM memory requirements and got the following:
xe vm-param-list uuid=f0ddc908-79a9-ea0f-7a22-17c8c4bd983c | grep ” memory-”
memory-actual ( RO): 0
memory-target ( RO): 0
memory-overhead ( RO): 1048576
memory-static-max ( RW): 512000000
memory-dynamic-max ( RW): 512000000
memory-dynamic-min ( RW): 512000000
memory-static-min ( RW): 512000000
Posted in Cloud Xen, Xen Support, Xen.org Promotion.
– March 4, 2010
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