Virtualization Tutorial: Configuring Citrix XenServer With FreeNAS & ISCSI For Storage

so we're going to take a look today at Zen server now XenServer is a type 1 hypervisor which means it runs directly out of hardware it's very similar to both procs box and ESXi server the VMware implementation and I like the interface for it and we're gonna get into some of the details now for demonstration purposes I'm showing you it installed on a VirtualBox which you're gonna give me an error partway through there just gonna say hey I think you're installing it in something that doesn't support you noble virtualization which is correct because you can't install this inside a virtual box because it only installs inside of other type 1 hypervisor but it's ideally installed right directly on the hardware when I once I go through this part of the video showing you how to install it will be the rest of its gonna be operating on actual Hardware I have sitting in my server rack and I'll show you how well the functionality works so you're presented at the beginning with the usual installer of like for Linux here standard keyboard sure capture yep it's convenient it lets you know welcome zone setup this tool can be used to install our upgrades and server systems make sure you have a backup there is options for doing implementations of if you have an old version it'll let you upgrade to a new version this is a clean install accept the end-user license it's going to be the this is the hardware error I mentioned where it says hey this is not set to virtualization no problem now we have one hard drive setup in here and I'm also going to turn on thin provisioning thin provisioning look it up and give you a real quick overview of it what thin provisioning does is allow you to say I have I'm gonna create a virtual 88 hard drive but I'm only when I loaded it requires 10 gigs so that means thin provisioning says oh it's not going to take 10 gigs of space on the hard drive if it's thick provisioned it Ella Kate's all of the hard drive space at once when so you have to have all that storage ready thin provisioning can get you in trouble but it also can can make things kind of easy because you could let's say have a bunch of hard drives and you've all thin provisioned in which means they have are only taking up the space they're actually using at that time but they could start having overruns you can go ahead and turn this on here in the beginning but for some devices like in this demo I'm going to show you how to hook it up to a nice cozy system it's not supported on there so local media this is being sold off a CD but if it's a USB bootable works the same way search for posit or ease I must get verification you know live life little risky here but if this is a protection system take the time to verify the install to make sure there's no errors or no problems with it set your password alright simple enough so a decent password this will be the root password for the system I'm gonna set it to automatic for the network configuration but you can at this time set specifically a IP address for this you can mainly or mag automatically specify hostname give it a name here then server to let everything else be on automatic America I like the fact that it has Detroit in here use NTP worry about that and then you run through the install in so it's pretty straightforward it's gonna run through the install reboot and be up and running so nothing nothing real complicated about this part so I'm gonna go ahead and fast forwarding each of the more interesting part other than the next and yeses and the final question it will ask is do you have anything else to install and the answer to that is no I'm just installing the XenServer apparently they have an option so if you're installing other packages with it you could put those in at the end right now I don't think I seen anything else that's under download to install what this version was then which is 7.2 all right now once in server is installed this is what the management interface looks like pretty straightforward there's not a ton here there is the ability to go into the local command line and there's a lot of command line things you can do with Sun if you need to change configurations we're also going to talk about doing it through the interface but if there's some advanced things you can get there you can get there from the local command shell here or you can simply SSH in which I find more convenient it does give you status display let you know what IP address the management network interface has you can change the management network interface now what this actually is is which interface is allowed to be can did for management so you can have multiple interfaces on this maybe they connect to different networks for your different virtual machines but you only select one to be your management interface but there's general like Hardware BIOS the timezone it's in and things you can do here you can also change the password it lets you know if you're logged in right now I'm not logged in so let's log in and log in real quick logging successful you can change the password change the auto logout time it is this all the general things here I really because most of my servers I mean I only go to the go to them when there's actually like a problem so for the most part you don't really need to use this there's not much there's not a whole lot here mostly we're gonna be doing it from the main graphical interface that actually runs in Windows that manages XenServer but I just want to show you what it looked like here Oh in local command shell and away you go one real quick note if you want to make sure connect Carol and it will show you the fingerprints for it when you're logging in so you'll make sure you're logging in to the right server so you want to do those levels of verification for security purposes to make sure it's not spoofed I do like the way it does really simply just by pressing in on the status give you that information so we've loaded the Citrix XenServer into Windows 10 virtual machine that I have because I run Linux and unfortunately there's not the best support for this specifically on Linux that is the one thing I don't care for what was in server but I like this interface quite a bit and it works really well and maybe in time me someone will port this over into Linux so the first you want to do is add our Zend server and I've already got the IP address in my head routes and then the password hit add and then you're in so now we can see some of the general settings and I'd actually already logged into this and configured the networks I just wanted to run that show there so here's the two different NICs and they actually are on separate networks just so you know and the reason that's important is I call this one is the dot three network this is on a dot two network they're physically separate network so my office ones going to be related to storage and one is related to the management interface and those are really easy click the configure and it's kind of confusing because it seems like you should be able to click these two click to configure which one but when you click configure it brings them both up here now it only lets you delete other ones you've added but you can add extra IP addresses to the networks in here so I can't phone to remove that one it's already got the two new network cards configured you can easily change the name of them I called this one which by the default name is actually storage 1 when you add more network interfaces on there and then here's the other one if I wanted to switch which NIC this assignment was on so pretty straightforward it actually nice because it also has help links down at the bottom so it'll tell you more about configuring it and jump straight into the help screens really straightforward stuff I did both of them static depending on your network configuration decide what works for you now you don't need to have multiple network interfaces you can run everything through one interface but one of the problems you run into is if you're uploading things through the management interface and the management network card is the one attaching to an external storage device via the network you now can be uploading and downloading and pulling from the storage all at the same time and you're just gonna create your own bottleneck putting the storage NIC on a separate network card and dedicating it for storage when I show you how to set the storage up here you'll see why that makes a little bit of sense especially because I'm putting in not in this particular server but another server that we're building has 10 gigabit SFP+ on it network interfaces into our freenas therefore it has to be a separate network because it's not tied into we're using direct there with no land in between I'm going to do a separate video on the 10 gigabit side but so when you're doing that it'll recognize all the different network cards and you'll be able to put them in and that's the faster way to connect alright so there's really nothing out of this end server right now it's really pretty basic so it tells you what's the total available for the VMS and when I start loading up some VMs will give you some more in saying that there's no licensing necessarily in this you can't Beit do purchase support licensing and it would have that information in here there are currently some updates that are required that's actually with these notifications down here at the bottom are is let me know that we have some updates oh and an error from reconfiguring the server it lost connection when I was reconfiguring cyma changed a management interface IP address right shaking it uh ago this is the list of notices as they go through can expand each one out and you can also dismiss all the notices that are in here now the updates a lot of the updates do require you to restart the server so make sure when you're running the updates that you have the virtual machine shutdown and run them as you can see this this was released in May so we get two updates for June 2 for August and one for September we're gonna go ahead and load all these now I haven't had a problem doing this normally you're gonna be loading them as they come but in this case because this is a fresh load I have to do all of them once you can do them automatically or you can do them somewhat manually and I say so mainly if you do them automatically they will go through shutdown all the virtual machines and go through a whole restart process you can also say don't restart just apply all the updates and then do one restart to save time I haven't had any problems and I've done that when I've load this the only thing I wish it had was an easy way just to say select all and load all of them at once but well I'll show you the process here for doing the updates so I'm gonna go to download and install also like they have go to webpage so you can find out what the update does nice if you care about the details so download install next now because they haven't configured anything more than the local storage it actually has to download it to somewhere so it's gonna download it to the default local storage and now we're just gonna run it check to go ahead and load this now this is all just the pre-check part to make sure it's all ready it seems very thorough here I haven't any problems running the updates this is where you have to allow or I will carry out post update tasks and post update tasks is actually restarting the server so we're gonna head install the update update installed successfully and now we're gonna go on to the next one and I'm gonna run through these real quick all right so all the updates now have now been loaded so our notifications are clear and we're going to go ahead and restart the server now if you notice in the objects down here we have it says object infrastructure organization of use save searches I mostly like the infrastructure view but you can view things in a different manner like I'm expanding out all the templates if you have a list of servers all the virtual disks tools and things that it sees in here this view makes more sense to me because I'm on this server and if you connect multiple servers and I'll have another one set up right now to connected to but you can connect it to multiple servers at once and they would all be on here this one's name is XenServer too so this kind of gives you an idea of how the view system here works so we're gonna make sure we're on this server selected which is the only one and server and we're gonna go ahead and reboot it I was so like if there's some other issues you can do just a restart of the tool stack if there's some type of control problem I've never had to use it and all my playing was then server kind of novel that it has that person gonna go ahead and server and reboot are you sure you want to reboot it say yes and it's gonna take a minute and reboot so it's all set it's reconnected I do have some air oh yeah lost connection because I restarted it I'm not sure why likes to tell me that I'm I've noticed said to restart it says it should try to reconnect 120 seconds I guess it will reconnect eventually I'm not sure how many times that retries you can probably set that but not let's you're you don't spend too much time rebooting your server so I don't think it's true but really that big of a deal oh and also just a side note right here is shutdown and or reboot all right up here as well all right so the first thing we're going to want to connect is some storage for this now you have the local storage there's no distant here right now there's no virtual disk attached to this and but it's kind of limited because I've only got a smaller SSD in this that doesn't give us a whole lot of storage now you could like I said at the beginning you could set up multiple drives in here and one thing about setting up the drives is if you do add hard drives to this after you've loaded it you do have to go to the command line and there's some tools that they have some command scripts that you can do an ad the storage device is locally to it I highly recommend you know Assoc maybe more Enterprise setting a lot of people have them up in a separate storage server and in my case FreeNAS and in my case also we're gonna do this with I scuzzy now the reason for doing this with I scuzzy in FreeNAS and I'm gonna walk you through the setup of that it's because with I scuzzy the rewrite is substantially faster with Zen well unfortunately and I believe it's an asynchronous write problem I've spent some time in a forum when you connect this over NFS it goes fairly slow and it's kind of aggravating and it turns out there's like some trickery you can do and change settings in PF sense to make it work it works with some NFS servers but I just chose to go I scuzzy because it works great there's no problems with it and it's it's not bad now the downside of I scuzzy is it is a block level protocol and Pia XenServer on a FreeNAS box is not going to support thin provisioning over I scuzzy but that's kind of take care of on the ZFS side because the FS compression works so well so you still have kind of extra storage you're not kind of show that it's kind of weird how that works but it does work really well because if you don't have a thin provisioned and you allocate something over a block it wants to take up the whole size of the drive but FreeNAS fixes that and goes yeah we understand that there's a lot of unused space or where you're gonna compress this file because I scuzzy to freenas is just a file sitting on ZFS is the logical way that's controlled so we're in FreeNAS and we go to services we go to I scuzzy and now we're gonna set up the portals now I already have a portal set up for the other server that I've got running and so we're gonna add another one but the first we got to do is tie it to an IP address this one's only listening on this port and we wanted to listen on more than one port so we have this one we're gonna add an extra portal because we're actually gonna use the same I scuzzy instance here so I don't have to recreate everything and tie this one to it now I scuzzy because what it does is it creates a file on ZFS that acts as a logically attached physical hard drive as far as XenServer or anything else that attaches to is cozy is concerned because it's a block level too that way FreeNAS it's sitting on the redundant radar that we have it's still fast and everything else so it's it's not a bad way to set this up so dot ten is the ten gigabit network and this one is the storage network that we're gonna have these n server attached to which is the 2.7 network so we're gonna do this all right so now this is attached to two different IP addresses this is the thing about I scuzzy you you know you have to specifically say what it's being attached to it's not like some of the windows Samba or other shares that automatically just attach to all the available IPs by default then we have the AIESEC as the initiator and I just leave that is all you do have to there's this only one group ID one initiator will edit real quick show you what's in here nothing you have to add this as an entry but this is where you can set up restrictions I have it sent to all networks but I can go specifically lock it down so only certain things to do and I might get away I can do that later for security reasons that way nothing can get in the way of I scuzzy I also have the I skate except to authenticate because I don't want anyone else that would perhaps get on my network and somehow plug in there also be able to just jump on there and I get to where the authentication is so you have to have at least one group ID I can add more in here but we're just gonna use the same one over again then we have the authorized users and add authorized Aztecs now I'm just gonna use the same user for both I use my username Tom and you just come up with these now the length of these passwords is I think it's seven to ten it's fairly specific you can't go too big and you can't go to smaller and give an error I had a longer password and I realized it didn't work I forget the exact number for I scuzzy but there's there's a limit to what it has to be and it's within a range targets XenServer so this is the target part and this is the portal it gets tied to the authentication is chap which is going to be based off that authorized access we set in the other one and this is for target XenServer one it is just generally for this end server I just call the XenServer one in case I added other servers or more service to it extense here's where you actually add the file so this is the file itself for the other one these n EXT just for the zone except i named it this this is the location of that I actually have a in my storage and let me jump real quick to that for you so on this ZFS Rey I have a separate data set called Zen storage the only thing I have within this folder is the I scuzzy files that are attaching to my Zen servers for storage so pretty straightforward its it's a subset of this it doesn't need anything too special to get it going because it's all being handled by free NASA's ice cuz the interface for all the permissions everything else so you just got created and you'll notice right away because I have a file on there already that it's compressing more than double of it that's because I created this large three terabyte file it's simply not using it matter of fact it's only seeing 1.1 gigs used out of it the volume itself has quite a bit storage but because of the compression that ZFS applies to it it without thin provisioning like I had said earlier it wouldn't do this it would automatically just get I'm using up all this much space even though you're technically not really using it up into virtual machines this is where ZFS kicks in and goes I'm gonna take care of that for you so let's go back over the services I scuzzy targets there's the target here the extents there's the one we're doing we're gonna add another extent yes my clever naming of Xen scuzzy cleverly I'll call it Zen to file browse to the extent Mount Jupiter Zen storage Zen scuzzy to extent sighs 1tb should be enough for this now you can set some of these other features here if you have some special need like for examples set up is a lot different logical block size or anything like that I've left this at default this is actually kind of interesting it because they have support presentin it actually has Zen and this year compatibility mode and it does it more friendly now this is also kind of novel and I'm not an expert at how this works a nice cozy but you can set the RPM of the drive and it defaults actually to SSD and it's it's a behavior of this because this is spread across a very fast rate array there's actually more speed than a standard maybe closer to an SSD because it's across several drives and eventually I'm going to be moving this over to an SSD array for more speed again so I just leave it at that and it takes care of the details so we're gonna hit OK alright so now we have each of these associated targets now this is the target for this one I don't show you how the target looks the Lund ID the extent and it's attached in server one we're gonna add another one it's in server one on 0 leave that at that but this is for our Zen 2 so this will go to the other file we created whoops it's gotta be I'm sorry I did that wrong it does have to be on lund 1 because we're using 1 0 I believe it stays for a logical unit number idea believe is what lund stands for scuzzy it's been a while I'm not a discuss the expert but back in the early days I used to do a lot of scuzzy stuff like in the 90s an old seals drives quite as much anymore alright so now we have the two different Drive options in here and it's all set up and configured for I scuzzy here in freenas so we can now attach our XenServer to it now one more thing you do have to do and it's fine to do this over even a Windows standard SMB share is if you want a bunch of ISOs in there for loading things you have to create a share and load the copy the ISOs into that chair and then the XenServer has access to all the ices you copy into that and I've got that set up in here as well that's just standard setting up a share and copying into it I'll show it inside the XenServer so we're in the XenServer we're gonna go ahead and add that storage repository and do it over I scuzzy I scuzzy virtual just storage that's fine target hostname 2.7 use chap tom are specifically length password put that in there scan target host nope I made a mistake here and actually I'm gonna leave this in the video because this was something I learned about the way FreeNAS handles I scuzzy it's kind of interesting we set all the settings the other services when you set the settings auto restart you do have to stop start please note doing that while virtual machines running may cause problems so now I should be able to scan target host and now all those settings work I don't know why after you change the settings it doesn't tell you you have to restart them but this caused me some headaches so I wanted to leave it in the video to make sure you guys see this is what happens you sell those things if renounced if you don't tell it to do this you're gonna have a problem so I'm gonna go ahead and choose this one right here since what we see for the target I'm just gonna scan that then how we chose the onesy row or one one so we're gonna go ahead and choose this one here button one because I'm using that one for something else and it finished do you want to format the desk absolutely go ahead and say yes now if you were rebuilding this as he's end server because it crashed or whatever and you rebuilt it you can attach it and it'll detect if there's drives already in there and says hey let's just reattach to these drives alright so in our storage here it is LVM over I scuzzy shared really nothing used tells you the size of it Wow that what it gives you the sizing gigabytes so now we have that set up now right here is the DVD drives on sensor this is if you have physical drives attached to it not any virtual ones then here's our local storage and so is what's used on there and then the removable storage which we're not going to play with I don't really have a purpose for that right now next thing we want to add is a ISO collection so you can do this over windows file sharing or you can do this over NFS I guess I'll do this one over NFS because I actually realize I've already got it set up on NFS so NFS ISO library I'll call it FreeNAS share pass put it ACT sheets on this network all right so now we've added our DVDs to this and it found them so now that those are in this part here DVD drives rescan nothing in their storage here's the one we added called free now slice the library and rescan see what I have in there huh no ISO is in there so I need to copy a couple aces in here real quick that's why I didn't see any all right and I need gparted in there because I have some machines I'm importing to this and it's a trick I cover a little and shortly you need to boot it off a CD to fix some times if it's the virtual machine was designed differently because the drive lettering may be different depending on what virtual machine you're importing it from so we're gonna head and do that and now that we've copied over there we do rescan and it shows up so pretty straightforward as far as that goes I like the way it's you know generally simple kind of weird you have to add them as a repository but once you've added them you can do properties and rename them if you want to call it something else that's you know nice way about all this works properties I scuzzy virtual discord storage we can call this FreeNAS I scuzzy storage and put a space there hit okay it's changed and even if you have things on there it's not going to really cause any problems it's just naming for your own it has its own way of doing everything matter of fact everything works behind the scenes with you you IDs so when you're doing things a lot of times you actually have to specify things by the UUID that it assigns you can use all the user friendly naming at the front here for your own purposes but the IDS are used on the backend now if we move back over here to our object view you can see the local storage or remote storage and by default it actually after I added a scuzzy automatically switch this to be the default storage now also default search means if you create something on the fly the default answer is going to be used through we use whatever the default storage is like the name implies it doesn't mean you can't use this one it just is just the way it does that it changes this to be the default but if I wanted to switch local to be default I could just hit right click and set back as defaults so not really a big deal there now here's all the templates and things like that so we're not going to jump out jump a little bit into those in just a second here but for the most part the server is all set up rebooting it it'll automatically reattach to its real storage devices give errors if there's not it does have troubleshooting if there's some connection problem for those where you can run through and do that so if any of these do have an error you'll get an error in the notifications here I knew that now one thing you notice that this has been just sitting here with a little one over it is because this one lost connection you do have to go over here and you can just miss selected or we're just going to go to dismissals I don't care about all these errors and notices of what was done but we'll also get into that when you're building virtual machines because those are the the notifications also contain the progress which was a little bit confusing you think there'd be a progress on the screen when you choose an action such as moving a VM but there's not it just drops all the progress into the notifications good and bad is there's it's all in there it's nice and contained but it's sometimes a little bit confusing some you saw a progress bar across the screen while it's doing stuff but it allows you to queue multiple commands up and they'll all show their progress status inside of there so let's get to the fun part here now that we've got this done now you can pool servers together like I said I only have one right here for demo maybe I'll do another one later show how you pull two servers together for shared resources but for the most part single server was probably a lot of people are gonna be running and so we'll leave it at this base except now if you want to create a new virtual machine pretty straightforward here you can use all the different templates they have and they've got ones for different versions of Linux and Windows and Windows Server 2016 and a lot of different options here that set there you can also just do other install media and go from there now we'll cancel this real quick and let's copy one more ISO over there alright and I just copied over the ISO for the Debian wnd rescan real quick there we go and now let's go ahead and create a new virtual machine now it only goes up to Debian 8 here but it doesn't really matter which one you choose we're gonna go ahead and choose this we're actually gonna name it what we want though devian 9 because that's actually what I'm using insulation media is this one here this is where they all show up so you by default to have the XenServer guest I out tools the CDs I loaded here out of the free dance library and then these ones here and I like how they have the option right here is to click and say so let's start a new ISO library if you want so we're gonna go ahead and choose the Debian one here where do you want to place this now you have to assign it a home server if you want it to be started automatically but you can actually if you have a list of servers in here you can there's options where you can spread it across multiple servers for some of the redundancy where you can see but which one does it start on so it's pretty straightforward but we only have one server special the only one that choose here then you have the number of CPUs now I this is kind of interesting because it allows me to choose more than I have in this system this is not a 32 system does not have 32 CPUs in it we'll go ahead and assign it just 4 cores you can also say four cores 1/4 socket or one socket with four cores or two sockets to course if the operating system cares that is an option and let's give it you can assign the memory here now this actually supports GPU back pass through with a they have a list under side of what GPUs are supported so you can actually pass through all the graphics don't do not have a graphics card in this at all other than what's on board so nothing we're gonna do there use these virtual disks we can change on the storage here if we edit this is where you can say I want it on that or I want it on the local XenServer storage you just hit edit and pretty straightforward and I'll show you you can actually move these afterwards so after you design and install something you can move it back over the other way and actually because this local storage is gonna be a little faster because it has a SSD drive in there we're gonna go ahead and put it over in here oh and let's up the size to 18 gig so let's go all the way 32 lost my mouse for a second so you're really just typing in what size you want whether it's gigs or megabytes next networking auto-generated I actually don't want it on my dot to network so we're gonna ahead and delete that one and just leave it on here and it's gonna auto generate a Mac and then we're gonna hit start the new VM immediately sure alright it's created now it shows up as another object over here now that it's crazy we got XenServer and here's the debian jesse 9 that we have running there's our council and now this is the council this is the performance graphs snapshots which we'll get into shortly the general of it you can see it's green we can actually force shutdown Ravech we're gonna shut it down and then you'll see it goes yellow because it's going through the shutdown process and red when it's shutdown and the council shows you a snapshot of what was last there so now we're gonna go ahead and start the VM back up turns yellow and then it's confirmed that it's starting all right now we're back now you can all so go fullscreen if we want send Control Alt Delete or undock and I like the undock because then it becomes just easy to move around and goes behind it now the weird thing is there we go I kind of like it's got an option when you're here find it or reattach so when you're going to each virtual machine you can find the console and it just brings it to the forefront so if you have a lot of them open you don't have to try and figure out what's what or you can just say reattached and put it back in here it's got scaling options but that kind of makes it ugly especially when you're doing some of these this thing is there's not really it automatically understands grabbing or not grabbing the mouse and changing focus so we're gonna head and run through the install just to set it up real basic to show you how it works inside of here and you can see it's nice and fast I'm not gonna run through an entire Debian install but you get the concept here for how this works and how quick it is to set a personal machine here ISO could have just as easily been Windows 10 it could have been that now someone may ask the question and there may be some way to do it but I didn't really look into this you can not not that I seen an easy way everything wants to solve from a so not from like a bootable USB so you can't just pop a USB and I didn't see any automatic pastor option to put in for example like a bootable USB to get it going it's generally expecting it I so that you crappy to your ISO directory and where we go now this is automatically configuring the network and running through everything as you can tell it just works and runs through the install and away we go now like I had said before about the size of the hard drive so this is hat this is copying some files they're obviously not that much rate changes to disk but when we actually pull up the size of hard drive here is the sense because II Tunes and one terabyte ends in scuzzy three terabytes and you're like wow you're using a whole lot of space but I've clearly not i've only assigned a 32 gig drive to it so you know what's an entire terabyte doing on here and how is it being used so this is what the drive reports that we're showing that we've got four terabytes used but let's actually go to FreeNAS and look at the storage 1.6 gigs use so the file systems reporting 3 terabytes used and I'm just worried confused me a little bit in FreeNAS and maybe I'll look up an answer on this at some point but it only says 1.7 X but it's clearly compressing way more than that and then when you look at the overall it says I'm using 1.2 terabytes this is where most of it is this is where some of it backs up some of my time backup which is my videos and things like that which is 107 gigs but when you look specifically at the volume presents storage only 1.6 kg of actual usage in here which completely makes sense because the other virtual machine I set it all up but there's no virtual machines well there is one it's like one 16 gig file and the other one but loaded wise it's a few hundred Meg's so it's doing an excellent job of compressing it so even though those files do report 3 terabyte and one terabyte they're clearly not using all of it all right now I'm gonna go ahead and but I cancelled on that so I'm gonna shut down this VM though because it's actually somewhat started long as it didn't partition it and it normally does this shut down so I send them like an AC API but then you can it force and force a shutdown now when we go over to the storage here's the storage local XenServer I can see what its attached to we can do the properties on it size and location size 32 gig read/write device position these are all your standard features when you're inside the VM so you can move where it is but you can also move it and current location is here which is local Xen and if I wanted to move this file over here I just say move while it's shutdown and it will move it right over to the I scuzzy storage what about importing virtual machines I actually have some I'm going to import here so we're gonna run an import and show you how that works so this right here is like so a unified which is actually Xen orchestra and I'll show you real quickly how this works it's neat I like it this solves my linux problem of how we're gonna use a web interface for it but there it's really really basic unless you pay and their pricing I guess it's reasonable if it's an enterprise but it's $70 a month continuous which I'm like okay for just for a web interface seems a little bit pricey they get a little bit better pricing if you do it yearly but it kind of novel that it works I'll show you how this works as well because it's another way you can control his end server so we're gonna go ahead and load it because it also gives us a way to do the importing of a virtual machine so we'll do this next great we'll go ahead and put this on local storage as well that way it's nice and fast and we want it on this same doubt 3 Network no problem next and start VM after and purge sure now this is where I said where's that progress part and there is one way down here but we're actually gonna go to the notifications events and this walks this is actually gonna tell you that this is being imported and preparing to import now it has time counting up it does not have time counting down so it doesn't tell me exactly how long this import is going to take you have the option here if you want to cancel any of these things that are running but at least a gives you an idea how it works and where the notifications are going other than this little bar down here and that little bar down there doesn't tell me when there's concurrent projects going at the same time now this also accounts for if we were to move something to a move something around you kind of got the same thing if I'm moving a piece of storage it's going to be in that same notification over there but no timer when it's going to be done other general things does cover real quick well that's importing is this is where you can edit the RAM set a fixed amount of memory once you load the XenServer up and put in for example you load up multiple you load the whole Zen tools part that will give you ability to over allocate memory so if the machines not using it because it loads a tool that can communicate directly with the virtual machine that's running and then that allows you to see the memory and say okay I can this computer's not using all the memory and shut it down I haven't loaded any of that so that's why says memory range cannot be setting this is where you can set actually a range of memory which is kind of neat that it lets you do that and now this virtual machine is imported the networking is all set up and it's probably booted it's thinking while it's thinking you can see what it's thinking about so it's got two CPUs assigned to it the send receive for the nic and disk read and write this is actually really clever I like the graphs on here I can edit this graph and add just all kinds of different things to this specific virtual machine or let's go all the way up here to the Zen server itself and go to perform and this is where you set up everything on the XenServer so what memory is being used and the little events are all notice here so it automatically added all the CPU so it's got 24 cores and right here is where I turned on to virtual machine you can see all the activity that started and went CPU being pinned right here you can also add more graphs so like if we want to look at the IEEE ops on our local storage or let's actually look at the I think we can look at it yeah local storage latency will get the total I ops on there you know we'll go ahead and just add that real quick save so then we can see the IEEE ops that are going for that also if you want to expand out this expands or contracts the thing at the bottom here so I can choose the range I want to look for so kind of neat can you can also just say it here one year one month this is ten minutes and you can see the history of the server and the performance of it so I really like the way the system does this because it makes it pretty pretty straightforward for figuring a lot of this out for going okay these are the performance issues and things like that so it is booted and ready to log in here now this has the support for the memory and you can even adjust on the fly because then to send server tools came pre-loaded when I import of that virtual machine so it gives me those options for minimum maximum static memory settings now it also let me do this it understands if the Zen tools are loaded the council will give you the IP address it will not give you the IP address and virtual machines you create but don't love the Zen tools so these apply for Linux and Windows by the way so here's the IP address that it's set to 3.77 and I'll show you real quick how's that Orchestra works so here's the 192 168 3 177 sign in and we'll go admin what the default is admin at admin net then it's admin and I highly recommend the first thing you do it's gonna want to know if you want to buy pro support right away free upgrade now that's essentially free they have they have charges for things so you can go in here and it has its own user manager so you can go in here settings users if I want to add myself another user I'm not setting this up right now so I'll just show you real quick how to add a server label XenServer - oops now this is where I'm gonna get an error but I'll show you you have to click this then do it because it does a self-signed certificate you have to do this if you haven't already signed the certificate it won't do that so this let you know it also kind of nice to let you just do a read-only for example if you want to set this up read-only and then orcish there's a really nice tool if you have the paid version there's all kinds of cool stuff you can do in here and create multiple users home the dashboard where all the graphs are not available in here I'm less you have the paid one but the VMS right there's an orchestra VM and I'm gonna say here's this one and you can hit start I can start stop move things around I can edit the VM I even get the council which is kind of cool so it works rather well and there we go Boop success it kind of gives you what's in the VM and what it's doing and because I cancel they partially done install it just kind of locked up right here oh by the way it does support PXE booting so if you do have something PXE on the network and you wanted to boot it pressing f12 will let you do that it does have those options inside of here and here's the Advanced Mode kinda weird to me cuz the buttons I didn't zoom this in the buttons are this big and it's just kind of strange to way they work but it's a nice it's a nice tool it gives you a nice web interface to see what's going on it gives you these graphs it just doesn't give you all the history I mean leave it on my server and use it because it's convenient so I can just open up a web interface and say hey I can manage my Zen server from this and the TAS show up here if there's an e pending tasks but it like I said you don't get any of the cool graphing features those are all a premium support feature there's some automation backup tools in here and those are all premium as well so give me just give you a idea how that looks it's pretty neat if it's something you want to load it's free to use the basic version with the basic controls free forever and you've seen how quick it was you just upload it and say yes and it's done now speaking of backing up virtual machines so let's go ahead here and shut this one down real quick vm shut down if you want to copy the vm and for example within pool or cross pool then you can just copy to another XenServer that's one way to do it you can move it to another sentence server you can convert it to a template you can also assign snapshot schedule kind of neat you can export it now this is something that I was told by people wasn't possible but it's actually really simple on these so this PC data I think I got a the backs back up and that's where I want to put it sorry for the profanity so I want it to be a standard OVF ova package or I can make it an XP a so it depends on what you want for the export so it supports more than one format you just hit next what's it gonna be do you want to add a license to it which I think it's kind of neat so if you wanted to build a virtual machine and a license to it next you can create the manifest and sign it and create a certificate for us so people can make sure it's on there you can create it will be package file and compress it which is nice that's how VirtualBox does it by default which is put everything in one file and put it in there so we do this and we're gonna go ahead and not verify some got time for that and finish and now once again goes to our little tasks down here one this is there it's going transferring it over and once again timer counting up I don't know exactly how long it's going to take to do this however long it takes to copy I think it said it was a 15 gig file however long it takes to copy those 15 gigs back over to my computer and I can see on my off screen on my third screen there's a my network is pinned right now and it's transferring quite a bit of data so that's copying it from that server through this Zen Center interface and down to my local computer so this is give you an idea of how that works but you know that's that's pretty straightforward you can export a virtual machine and you can import virtual machines really easy I can even import virtual machines and actually I can that's because I don't care about the backing this up and this is click cancel and will give me an error that it failed we know yep import source now let's go ahead and V look at these these are different ones and let's do pfSense because it's rather small so here's my pfSense just a standard OVF generally I'm looking which ones switch here and I think this is the one I wanted so we'll just do pfsense next import to there yep next go ahead and put it on local storage again so I know it's fast it had a couple networks attached to it so I want one network hard on each of these operating system fix up is an option where you can there was a tool called operating system fix up to fix things in it the nice thing about PF sense is because it doesn't care about what hard drives are are it'll automatically do the hard drives without any no you don't really got to do anything to change it to boot it so go ahead and hit finish and it's going to import that one now now this was exported specifically from VirtualBox now one of the things is interesting that it has to do is break it down into the VMDK file so it exports the VMDK file locally on your computer and that's why I had to stare at it a second because you can't import just raw VM decays as well now this will give me an idea what it's doing now this is being done by the Zen tool so I can do the import it broke out the ova ova file into a VMDK and did an extraction on my computer then it does the import on there it doesn't do that if it's a native Zen but it's something about the way it if it doesn't I think it's because it has to change to hard drive types so if it's hard drive types not exactly compatible it's going to do a swap around and pull these in slightly different and it's going to say ok I have to export this with v mu k then i'll import it into our file formats inside of there i just confirm looking at them they have VHD and VMDK support as well in there so you can import from different appliances and it's the same thing with the export you can you can import raw disk images in here as well and of course it exports back as OVF OVA files like I just shown and I have tested when you export these VirtualBox for example which is my other go to does have the ability to bring them right back in it didn't seem to have a problem from things I imported exported and things like that but there is at least one issue that we're gonna show and talk about real quick here now this is the one thing I ran into when I imported some of the servers is on the system it'll column slash to have Sta or it'll say XV sta for part of the way it does the virtual machines so you have to line up on import if it's using grub and grub is not using UUID it's pointing directly at a drive I find that I had to adjust it well not necessarily grub but the mounts inside the machine if they're pointing not at UUID but it's specifically like SDA then you would have to go in and boot some of those up so I did have that trouble when I was importing some of the machines but really wasn't that big of a deal and you know didn't cause me too much grief it was pretty easy to fix she just put off this gparted live CD go in there and edit the mountie FS tab file and away you go so I'm gonna close this back down but that's how you do it this is also my half allocated machine so I can go ahead and delete now destroying your virtual machine just as easy we can go ahead and delete the VM are you sure and you can do multiple deletes as well it lets you know that yes you can't recover this we're gonna head and delete and it frees up the space and that's done now you see also I have this turned on to view hidden objects which is right here which is why you see the transfer but just so you know the default view doesn't let you see the transfers themselves I was doing this when I was doing some testing and I kind of liked it because it shows you like transferring landing onyx I started to transfer Windows 10 and once again go to notifications here is that import but nice thing is while it's doing all that magic and importing this virtual machine of Windows 10 that I'm pulling in I can keep using the machine while I wait for it all to happen alright so I have a couple different virtual machines in here the db9 when I went ahead and finished installing that pfSense I'll leave dormant for now I'll leave the Zen orchestra running and I also imported a Windows 10 so I can show you what it looks like running Windows inside of Zen server because that's you know could use case for it if you want to virtualize your windows installs whether they be server or workstation installs that completely doable manageable inside of Zen so the first thing you want to do is load the Zen tools because without the Zen tools loaded it doesn't have any extra information or interaction from Zen directly to these and you don't have to load them but they do open up a few more features I want to show you how you they load so you go here and go to Council and choose the DVD drive and for this Windows 10 virtual machine same thing I chose the guest tools now sometimes when you first import it it'll say click here to create the DVD unlike some of the other virtual machines at work code specifically a VirtualBox if there's nothing here there's no DVD Drive you click a button that says create the DVD Drive and I think yeah click here to create a DVD Drive like you see here once you create it it's in there it doesn't show up as any other piece of the storage so we'll go ahead and fire up our Windows 10 so it's booting up in the background because it's not an amazing performance gigabit to I scuzzy is not bad it's usable but it's not going to be your super hanging you really need either high-speed local storage or a high-speed like bonded SFP connections like I'm using with the other system so you get really high performance so go ahead and start the Windows 10 alright I'll let it that do its magic I already have the Debian one started up here the Debian started up and now the first thing we do is I'm gonna go to mount real quick I'm just gonna make a Zen tool CD and we're just gonna run mount and I'm already running his route that's why I'm not running sudo dev it just call ups cd-rom slash mount send tool see I just chose to call it that you can call it whatever you want well you got a spell mount right right protected read-only CD mount send tools LS we have a Linux directory so we're gonna go ahead and go in there and there's an install so I'll just slash install Sh yep setup to get utilities you should reboot the virtual machine sure go ahead and reboot it real quick I'll move this out of the way you'll actually see it rebooting in a council here all right now that virtual machine is put it back up and virtualization seat optimized 7.1 installed virtual hard resistant now it understands exactly what it is operating system debian 9.2 stretch because now the two are talking to each other so pretty straightforward now this option comes up as well to do the memory allocation where I can see maximum minimum memory or set a fixed amount of memory these are options now that all turned on for that optimization now let's go and look at Windows 10 so it's booted up and right now it has no idea it says operating system unknown because there's no interaction we just imported a raw hard drive out of my VirtualBox I actually hit expert on VirtualBox locally dropped into a file imported it right here it boots right up and this is ready I could be doing this with a local or whatever account it just exported exactly as it was on my machine with my signed in windows account now because we have the DVD drive is the guest tools right here's the Zen tools just double click it and I'll go ahead and just run this 64 windows 64 Zen and it'll run through a standard Windows installer and load the Zen tools here on Windows 10 and same thing we'll go ahead and restart the virtual server maybe the settings yeah it still hasn't picked anything up once I restart the virtual server here oh yeah it wants it needs to restart it let me know there was a slight delay well the performance is not amazing this is not a super high-end server this is running on it's an older Opteron board and of course this is attached to the ice cozy and over a gigabit network which has its performance issues on its own it's not really a reflection of XenServer it's a reflection of the hardware configuration that we have in use sensor has no problem I have this on a faster machine it works really fast really happy with it and after we log back in windows management and Asian installed successfully on reboot and the graphics seemed to be maybe a little bit faster when it does this I think the screen yeah the screen redraw definitely looks a little better a little bit less laggy but it's pretty straightforward to install the tools on there and once you've done that it understands this is Windows 10 Pro it has all the different information in here and like back to the memory we can change some of the memory information and I don't believe you need to need to reboot the virtual machine to do this it'll let you choose these things and yeah it doesn't have to be rebooted to do that so I can change memory allocation and things like that because it's communicating directly with the underlying virtual machine it's a lot to do some of these things now another neat thing is you can turn on remote desktop and instead of launching this Council when you go here you can tell it to launch a remote desktop and it also similar you can tell it instead of polling over the council you can say OpenSSH council and it'll ssh in because now it knows didn't pick this one up in here maybe i got to reboot it again it will in Windows 10 it knows what IP address is assigned to this Windows 10 unit because it's now communicating they're off there's probably something I need to change you get a communicating here with Debian box like it does here with the send one but either way because it has that communication it knows what it is all's it's doing is opening up RDP session that you could do yourself but kind of novel that it leaves that option on there especially we need to start managing a lot of virtual machines if you don't think about the right p addresses you could actually launch it on there so let's talk about snapshots so we'll go ahead and I'm gonna make a new folder real quick and there's our folder that's on this machine here so let's go over here to snapshots and I'm gonna go ahead and live and clean snapshot with the XXX folder all right we have it screeding alright now we have that snapshot now this is where it gets kind of fun so let's go back over to the council and we're gonna make oops another new folder let's call it all twos now we have the snapshot before that was there we're gonna head and delete this one matter of fact let's just delete things off the desktop here and go ahead and shut the system down now I did two snapshot on purpose as a live running state so windows will realize there was a harddrive error and have to do whenever appropriate fixes that it may need to do if we restored that snapshot but we'll also do another one that's a glaze clean snapshot again and kind of show you how the flow of snapshots so now it's shutdown snapshots take another snapshot and we'll call this two two two two folder now this is where you can just say revert to this one so we will we're going to go revert back to this one here and also take a snapshot of the current VM before I revert sure let's play another split before we roll back you don't have to do this but there we go now you can view these as a list right here or put it back as a tree view now this is where it's kind of neat the tree view is going to now we've created I like to almost look em as alternate timelines so now this is where it's at so when I have the VM its booting back up right now because it automatically goes and kicks off the VM after you revert it back to a previous state and here we are back to the VM that only had this folder and these icons in the desktop now if I wanted to go back and use one of these ones I can say new VM from this snapshot so I can actually now create an entirely new VM if I want called before we roll back next and that so it'll give it that name because it's gonna give it the name of the snapshot now I can fork it and have two different copies of it on there and even move it to another server and go through move it to another storage unit if I want and split that so you can do these you can even save these as a template export that VM to a file I like that feature a lot because maybe I want the features I added on here so I want to export it and so will actually lets you backup that specific one or any specific one really to a file first is that and if you just don't want these because you want to get rid of the space you can just delete these snapshots and they go away and like that before we roll back is gone and you can even continue this and you can fork them as many times you want I don't know what the limit is other than the mess you'd create from it I you can create quite a bit of us different snapshots of different States now this is really handy for machines when you're loading software or you're maybe have an update that's giving you trouble you have a snapshot you load the update great you want to keep it you can you delete the other snapshots it didn't go well I go ahead and shut the server down and roll it back to the other one really kind of a nice way to if you have a virtual machine and I love this a lot in Linux when I have some software that I may want to install this quickly I go I think I want to try this you know tool take a snapshot of one of my W machines and then create a clone of it even right away that way I have a clean base that I know works I want to know if it works with our software and if I like it I just merge it back in so it's kind of a really nice workflow for doing all the virtual machines and everything else so I'll show you real quick though how do we move the storage now that I've got all this other stuff so here is the storage for the Debian and highways so we can do the move we're gonna move it over to here we can just hit move now it is moving it live which is kind of neat and it should complete live now I realized it only does this as long as you have the tools or installed it has the ability to talk to the virtual machine it says all right you can be moved and it'll do a live move of that virtual machine and it should be able to keep running while it's doing this and go back we can watch it now I use once again notifications are here moving virtual machine looks like it's about done back to here devian and it's none the wiser that it's getting moved doesn't even have any load on the machine because all the load is being done by the Zen server itself but this virtual machine is just being handed off and the files moved so if there's users running on it my vision is probably some performance set but now we go back over here to the storage and it's now on the FreeNAS I scuzzy storage it took all of the that wasn't sped up at all so it took only a few minutes to move that over it take a little bit longer to move them depending on the amount of storage you have so this is a 62 gig file versus that was a 16 gig file but you couldn't get the idea that you can take and move these without shutting them down to different storage devices really nice for high availability if you're like I said before about upgrading your storage arrays you attach a storage ray as long as it's got the tools loaded in there as you work now a couple things that don't know if I can load the tools on I haven't tried it what about the tools work in pfsense but I get worried about loading any of those type of tools and pfsense says they may if you're using this as a your primary firewall loading all those end tools in there if there's any conflicts I don't know maybe I'll have that reach out to the PF says people see if there's any issues with loading the Zen tools on there I generally don't like to load anything extra in to be up sense because it's such a critical piece of infrastructure I don't like any potential interference but this gives you a good idea how Zen server works it's not too complicated I wish it all would a web interface without having to run the extra like this but you can do a lot from the council I'll go ahead and show you a couple quick things you can do in the council for it so this is me logged into the XenServer so we'll run Zen top for example is one of the tools and it lets you see the virtual machines running lets you arrow up and down through them this is a similar to the way I believe it's essi does this so you have a command interface so you can see this there is in here XE tab a couple times a lot of different tools you can do all the backups exports imports and script everything from the storage and everything else all through the command line here so it's got options to run traces it has a Zen apps CLI each one gives you a whole set of tools the documentation is actually really thorough on their website which is nice so if you have some really interesting or challenging problems with your Zen system this is a good way you can get into the backend and very much watch what's going on so it does work really well and one last little thing I will cover that I thought was cool is backing up the Zen server itself let's say you want to protect yourself from something catastrophic you can actually in the Zen server itself well you can import and export the XenServer list that's part of the Zen Center software but then the server itself actually has backup options on it and right here's you click on the server that you want you go to server and you're gonna say backup or restore from backup and when you do the backup it backs up all the settings presented so the I scuzzy all the little steps we did recover repositories this is really nice because what happens is not tested this is really slick if you have a catastrophic hard drive failure on your Zen server itself you just reload Zen get it into the base configuration probably load some updates and then do a restore and you're done you now have your XenServer reattach to everything that it knew all that work and effort you put in there and this is what's nice having a separate files server as in freenas automatically go okay these are the connections for the eyes in France is holding on to all those files at reattaches and everything's back to normal so I it's nice that you don't have to do anything from the server side and it creates just a standard backup file and the restore is right in here so you don't really need to do anything for that the last thing I guess a cover is there is a maintenance mode on the server like I said I haven't really had to do it but if you had to change some functions of it you can or maintenance mode and shutdown all of the servers themselves and that's pretty much it for Zen server kind of cool look at the performance of what happened when I did these we'll give you the whole hour here or the day you can see all the starts and stops of the VMS and how much processor power it's using and it created like a whole scribbly graph of stuff for importing these VMs but pretty neat it likes it overall really happy was then server I might be doing some more specific videos here and there on it it's about it's powerful it's nice it is open-source but this management interface is not so I like the fact that it's open source I like this easy management interface as I've said before I mean I'm very good at the command line but I like a system that is easy for my staff to use and they can actually attach to this interface that I can create even separate users for them and give them access to the virtual machine that they need to have access to generally my staff works they have access to all of them but this allows them to from their desktops login and manage the system without having to know too much but they can get the server's up and down started if they need to or if they have to create something in here once again thanks for watching if you like the content here like and subscribe if you want some more XenServer videos let me know at some point I might do some real specific ones if I ever set up by a h8 cluster for high availability that is a feature to support it in here as well alright thanks for watching

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 88,764

Keywords: xenserver, xenserver 7.2, xenserver tutorial, xenserver installation and configuration, xenserver cluster, xenserver 7, xenserver backup, xenserver web ui, citrix, virtualization

Id: -KmgwQORAX8

Length: 70min 35sec (4235 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Gamerfanatic]

I've always been told that iSCSI on FreeNAS was a poor solution due to a recommendation to only use 50% of the storage space.

http://doc.freenas.org/9.10/sharing.html#extents

"For performance reasons and to avoid excessive fragmentation, it is recommended to keep the used space of the pool below 50% when using iSCSI. As required, you can increase the capacity of an existing extent using the instructions in Growing LUNs."

[u/Server22]

Tom makes great videos!

[u/christronyxyocum]

Thanks for the guide. I'm going to try the same thing, but with unRAID.

[u/Yoblad]

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think XenServer does thinprovisioning on block storage. I think NFS is primarily recommended for this reason.