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

• Oracle Releases Virtual Box 3.14
• ConVirt 2.0 Announced
• Xen Hypervisor Monitoring with Zenoss Announced
• Xen.org Mascot Contest – Three finalists announced
  • Entry #5 – Zen Penguin from Dana Rawding
  • Entry #1 – Bonsai Tree form Joe Shon
  • Entry #10 – Sitting Panda Chewing Bamboo from Valentin Höbel

Xen Events

• Xen Summit North America at AMD April 28-29, 2010
  • Speaker Topics Submission – Submit at http://xensummit.org
  • Local Hotels – http://www.xen.org/files/xensummit_amd10/HotelListing.pdf
• Citrix Synergy May 11 – 13 in San Francisco, CA – Looking for booth volunteers
• SouthEast LinuxFest 2010 June 12-13, 2010 in Spartanburg, SC – Looking for booth volunteers
• Bring Xen.org to an event near year – Do you know of an event near you that would be served by having a Xen.org booth? If so, I have a proposal for working together to support that event; http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/01/28/bring-xen-org-to-your-local-event/

Xen Products

• Xen 4.0 Release Candidate 5 Available for Testing – http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-unstable.hg TAG = 4.0.0-rc5
• Xen 3.4 Release Candidate 3 Available for Testing – http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-3.4-testing.hg (tag 3.4.3-rc3)
• XCP Tutorial – Building a HVM Guest from Command Line Interface – Memory Issues with new VMs – Installing a VM Operating System from CD

Xen Members in Action

• Xen Community Member Highlight – Thiago Martins
• Boris Quiroz and Marco Sinhoreli have completed a new XCP article for Linux Magazine Brazil
• Xen.org Mailing Lists SuperStars – Jeremy Fitzhardinge, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk, Sheng Yang, James Pifer , Pasi Kärkkäinen, and John Madden

Xen Weekly Stats

• Project Golden Ratio February Data Available

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

GOAL – Use the Command Line Interface to build and launch a HVM guest from a CD of Oracle Enterprise Linux Release 5 Vol 4 for x86 (32-bit)

Step 1 - Connect to XCP Server from remote machine; I opened a terminal window and entered the following command: ssh -l root IP ADDRESS

Results:
stephen@stephen:~/Documents/Blog$ ssh -l root IP ADDRESS
root@IP Address’ password:
Last login: Wed Mar  3 17:33:54 2010 from IP ADDRESS
Type “xsconsole” for access to the management console.
[root@xenserver-reiazupz ~]#

Step 2 – I leveraged the existing XCP documentation found at http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/Command_Line_Interface or http://www.xen.org/files/XenCloud/guest.pdf (Chapter 4; Page 21).

a) Place the Linux Install CD in the CD drive on the XCP Machine
b) Run the command xe template-list

Results (shortened for required information):
uuid ( RO)                : 5a3ee06c-3078-cec0-015c-a19cf3c7799d
name-label ( RW): Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.0
name-description ( RW): Template that allows VM installation from Xen-aware EL-based distros. To use this template from the CLI, install your VM using vm-install, then set other-config-install-repository to the path to your network repository, e.g. http://<server>/<path> or nfs:server:/<path>

c) Run  xe vm-install template=”<template_name>” new-name-label=<name_for_vm>
* <template_name> is from above Results, “Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.0″
* <name_for_vm> is your choice, I chose “oraclevm”
RESULTS – The UUID of the new oraclevm => vm_uuid

d) Run xe vbd-list vm-uuid=<vm_uuid> userdevice=0 params=uuid –minimal
RESULTS – The Root Disk UUID => root_disk_uuid

e) xe vbd-param-set uuid=<root_disk_uuid> bootable=false
RESULTS: No Output

f) Run  xe cd-list to get the name  of the CD Drive on the XCP machine
RESULTS: CD Drive name (e.g. SCSI 0:0:0:0) => host_cd_drive_name_label

g) Run xe vm-cd-add vm=<vm_name> cd-name=”<host_cd_drive_name_label>” device=3
RESULTS:No Output

h) Run xe vbd-list vm-uuid=<vm_uuid> type=CD params=uuid –minimal
RESULTS: CD VM UUID  => cd_drive_uuid

i) Run xe vbd-param-set uuid=<cd_drive_uuid> bootable=true
RESULTS: No Output

j) Run xe vm-param-set uuid=<vm_uuid> other-config:install-repository=cdrom
RESULTS: No Output

k) Run xe vm-start uuid=<vm_uuid>
RESULTS: No Output

At this point, the VM will start on your XCP machine and you should hear the CD Drive start working. To install the OS within the VM I again chose to use OpenXenCenter and was able to connect easily to my XCP machine and install the OS via the VM Console window. See image below:

As I mentioned at the start of this example, I will be adding another blog to detail the memory issues I had in launching this new VM on my XCP machine. Also, I am still waiting for my Windows 7 CD to arrive in the mail and will post another blog with instructions to launch Windows on XCP.

Some highlights that I found interesting:

• Xen Cloud Platform home page is now #4 in page hits
• Document Support page continues to receive 3x hits compared to Community Support page
• Number 1 blog posting for month was Xen HA Cluster Demo Videos with 936 views; confirms my belief that we need more how to videos on Xen.org
• Xen.org Solution Search Tool – strong number of product hits with 3,864 and an amazing 16.33% click thru rate
• Xen-users mailing list had an 80.39% answer rate down from 89.76% in January; March data will give us a sense of where the average is

As usual, if you have any ideas for items to track or other feedback please email me or add a comment to this message.

Entry #5 – Zen Penguin from Dana Rawding
Entry #1 – Bonsai Tree form Joe Shon
Entry #10 – Sitting Panda Chewing Bamboo from Valentin Höbel

Thanks to all the people who submitted their ideas for this contest. There was a good selection of choices for the community to select from.

The next phase in the contest is to work with an artist to create several sample mascot ideas for each of the entries. These images will be used in the final vote as the Xen.org community selects a mascot.

If anyone out there would like to volunteer their design services please contact me soon as I will begin looking for a designer for this project next week.

If you would like to nominate someone for the community member highlight section, please contact me.

http://www.convirture.com/blog/2010/announcements/introducing-convirt-2-0/

- ConVirt Team