SchoolBusDriver Posted January 27, 2014 Share Posted January 27, 2014 What I found with Xen, is that after half a day trying to get things up and running with a command line, I broke down and tried about 3 other things, and then two days later, I broke down again, and installed xenserver, and windows on it's own hardware so that I could manage the thing. The "magic sauce" with Citrix XenServer was their own proprietary Management toolstack and tools. They have released that to the open source community (late last year) and now the Linux Foundation does the development for it. Problem is, they haven't got it caught up with where Xen is today (XenServer runs 4.1.5). Hopefully it won't be too much longer till it caught up with Xen 4.X and you can use XenCenter or OpenXenManager to manage it. As far as having a plugin that asks questions CPU, memory, PCI Passthrough, etc. for the Xen VM cfg file... that isn't that complicated and something a plugin can do. I hope that there's something that can be included with/plugged into unRAID to make VM management fairly easy. It's only a matter a time. There are several open source projects already in the works which would work great. Just need them to complete the development and testing before I would recommend using them. Quote Link to comment
Dephcon Posted January 27, 2014 Share Posted January 27, 2014 I'm very excited about running VMs on top of unraid. Once this feature is sorted out I'll start beta testing. Quote Link to comment
bmfrosty Posted January 27, 2014 Share Posted January 27, 2014 It's only a matter a time. There are several open source projects already in the works which would work great. Just need them to complete the development and testing before I would recommend using them. I am massively happy to have just found this page: http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Management_Tools ConVirt and Kimchi both look interesting, although both want to manage multiple servers - hopefully one or the other are not too overkill. Quote Link to comment
SchoolBusDriver Posted January 27, 2014 Share Posted January 27, 2014 ConVirt and Kimchi both look interesting, although both want to manage multiple servers - hopefully one or the other are not too overkill. As I said earlier, there is a thread that several of us started and discussed the various WebGUIs. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=30707.0 Quote Link to comment
BLKMGK Posted January 27, 2014 Share Posted January 27, 2014 I've actually been l been looking at XenServer to play with now that its been open sourced. I see from some posts that its on an older version of Xen however :-( Is their desktop management tool (Windows based) worth looking at and could it interface with some other backed running Xen? Reading posts from some of the more experienced folks it sounds like KVM might be easiest to work with and as powerful - are there perhaps equal or better management tools for that? I'm awaiting a heatsink from Amazon for an i7 920 I had laying around. As soon as I have that this week and get a test license on a stick I too will be taking the new beta for a spin! I have to say I'm learning a good bit about what can be done with Linux reading back through threads and researching, had I realized so much interesting stuff was being tossed around I'd have been more active earlier lol :-) Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
limetech Posted January 27, 2014 Author Share Posted January 27, 2014 -beta3 status: Got Xen hypervisor kernel (ver 4.3.1) booting off flash, which then chain-boots unRaid OS 6 dom0. All the Xen daemons seem to start. Next up is getting the network bridge set up. Anyone want to save me some time and provide a pointer to a domU VM config & image to try out? Quote Link to comment
PeterB Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 A couple of people have reported nfs problems with beta 2? Are these being addressed? Since I'm totally committed to nfs, I'm a little hesitant to move my one and only server over to 6.0. Quote Link to comment
BLKMGK Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 I wouldn't run anything but a test server on 6.0beta right now. Tom is offering discounted keys for testing in the Announcements section... Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
nicinabox Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 A couple of people have reported nfs problems with beta 2? Are these being addressed? Since I'm totally committed to nfs, I'm a little hesitant to move my one and only server over to 6.0. You should wait for a stable release and not try to upgrade as fast as possible. Betas have problems. That's why they're prereleases. Don't install prereleases on a production machine. Quote Link to comment
coppit Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 Anyone want to save me some time and provide a pointer to a domU VM config & image to try out? Maybe one of the appliances? http://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/builds http://www.greenreedtech.com/virtual-appliances/centos-6-3-64-bit/ Quote Link to comment
tyrindor Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 -beta3 status: Got Xen hypervisor kernel (ver 4.3.1) booting off flash, which then chain-boots unRaid OS 6 dom0. All the Xen daemons seem to start. Next up is getting the network bridge set up. Anyone want to save me some time and provide a pointer to a domU VM config & image to try out? Please test .exes stored on unRAID accessed via SMB. Any installers, standalone programs, etc. About 9 in 10 of them do not work on this version, but worth perfectly on 32bit. There's some weird type of permission issue going on with them. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31525.msg286138#msg286138 Quote Link to comment
limetech Posted January 28, 2014 Author Share Posted January 28, 2014 Please test .exes stored on unRAID accessed via SMB. Any installers, standalone programs, etc. About 9 in 10 of them do not work on this version, but worth perfectly on 32bit. There's some weird type of permission issue going on with them. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31525.msg286138#msg286138 Here's a workaround: From windows right-click the exe file and select Properties. Click Security tab and then click Edit button (to change permissions). Check the "Read & execute" box in the Allow column. Click Ok. Now the file should execute. You can do something similar on the server side, by usng the 'chmod +x <filename>' command. There must be something different with Samba 4 with regards to "execute" permission handling.. I'll have to look into it further. Quote Link to comment
coppit Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 Tom, at work we found that Samba 4 is much more secure about ownership and permissions. We had to chmod -R and chown -R a bunch of files written with Samba 3 in order for them to be properly visible in the share, after the upgrade. We also observed significantly better performance, but that was running Samba from inside a VM hosted on Xen Server 6.2. So maybe a tweak to the fix perms script might be in order? Quote Link to comment
tyrindor Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 Please test .exes stored on unRAID accessed via SMB. Any installers, standalone programs, etc. About 9 in 10 of them do not work on this version, but worth perfectly on 32bit. There's some weird type of permission issue going on with them. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31525.msg286138#msg286138 Here's a workaround: From windows right-click the exe file and select Properties. Click Security tab and then click Edit button (to change permissions). Check the "Read & execute" box in the Allow column. Click Ok. Now the file should execute. You can do something similar on the server side, by usng the 'chmod +x <filename>' command. There must be something different with Samba 4 with regards to "execute" permission handling.. I'll have to look into it further. Thanks! Hopefully we won't need to do this workaround in the future. Quote Link to comment
clowrym Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 I just ran into this in my log, never seen it before...Looks like it was fixed in a previous v5 release... Jan 27 04:40:01 test logrotate: ALERT - exited abnormally. Quote Link to comment
PeterB Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 You should wait for a stable release and not try to upgrade as fast as possible. Betas have problems. That's why they're prereleases. Don't install prereleases on a production machine. I wouldn't run anything but a test server on 6.0beta right now. Tom is offering discounted keys for testing in the Announcements section... I know, and understand, the cautions. However, as a retired IT professional, I'm prepared to accept some risk in order to support the development efforts. Looking back, I can see that I went straight from 4.7 to 5.0b4. Yes, I could take up the offer of a discounted key (or even simply run the basic free three drive system) ... if I had spare hardware. The truth is that all my 64-bit capable hardware is in use. I have been doing some plugin development on my Ubuntu desktop machine - rebooting into unRAID 6.0 (free) to compile/build/test, but it's a pain ... especially as I don't have any spare drives to set up an array. I've already released the apcupsd plugin - I now have dovecot, mpop, dnsmasq, minidlna and logitechmediaserver plugins ready for serious testing. Minidlna is supposed to be a static build, but it didn't seem to start up properly when I ran it - need to investigate. I also want to have a look at MariaDB as the preferred replacement for MySQL. All of this would be a lot easier if I had a machine permanently running unRAID v6 ... hmmm, can I justify upgrading my X9/Xeon v2 to an X10 Xeon v3 system ... But that would take a little while, getting all the parts delivered to Philippines., and require a financial commitment. Quote Link to comment
SchoolBusDriver Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 I know, and understand, the cautions. However, as a retired IT professional, I'm prepared to accept some risk in order to support the development efforts. Looking back, I can see that I went straight from 4.7 to 5.0b4. The underlying Kernel, File System and all the various APIs for those, etc. hasn't really changed except for some very minor tweaks Tom did to the unRAID module. Whatever "tweaks" Tom is addressing in 6.0... I bet 95% or more done in Slackware, various software Packages (and configuration files) or the unRAID WebGUI. They won't be done in the Linux Kernel or unRAID Kernel Module. Samba4 for example does permissions differently. Tom isn't make changes to the Linux Kernel or the unRAID Kernel Module to fix them. That will be done in Slackware or the config files for Samba4. Samba4 isn't going to scrambled your drives either... Worst case, a copy will bomb out halfway through or permissions issues. I have use my production unRAID drives and used all the various Release Candidates for unRAID, switched back in forth between ESXi, Xen, XenServer, KVM, bare metal countless times and even installed / run unRAID in 4 or 5 different Linux Distos. I have had ZERO problems with the drives or the data contained on them. Now I wouldn't recommend doing this for your average user but with your skill set, this isn't a problem for you. I also want to have a look at MariaDB as the preferred replacement for MySQL. MariaDB is a MySQL fork founded by the original MySQL developers. It is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the MySQL Database Server and you won't notice a difference. Trust me, if all the various Linux Distros (Enterprise ones too) switched too it. I can assure you that it went through more testing with software / databases 1,000,000 more times more complicated than you or I can possible fathom. The reason for the change is Oracle and Linux Nerds in a pissing match over mysql's dual license more than anything. Many also believe Oracle is moving MySQL to closed sourced (speculation at this point) which didn't help. Really nothing to look at because aside from the name change, you won't see / feel / notice a single difference between MySQL or MariaDB. Quote Link to comment
butlerpeter Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 -beta3 status: Got Xen hypervisor kernel (ver 4.3.1) booting off flash, which then chain-boots unRaid OS 6 dom0. All the Xen daemons seem to start. Next up is getting the network bridge set up. Anyone want to save me some time and provide a pointer to a domU VM config & image to try out? Am I correct in understanding that to mean Xen is booting on bare metal then booting unRAID as a VM? Wasn't the purpose of adding the VM related stuff, to the unRAID kernel, to make unRAID the bare metal kernel that would be hosting other VM's? Quote Link to comment
TheDragon Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 -beta3 status: Got Xen hypervisor kernel (ver 4.3.1) booting off flash, which then chain-boots unRaid OS 6 dom0. All the Xen daemons seem to start. Next up is getting the network bridge set up. Anyone want to save me some time and provide a pointer to a domU VM config & image to try out? Am I correct in understanding that to mean Xen is booting on bare metal then booting unRAID as a VM? Wasn't the purpose of adding the VM related stuff, to the unRAID kernel, to make unRAID the bare metal kernel that would be hosting other VM's? That's what he is doing, I believe dom0 is the 'Xen way' of describing the host. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
ironicbadger Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 -beta3 status: Got Xen hypervisor kernel (ver 4.3.1) booting off flash, which then chain-boots unRaid OS 6 dom0. All the Xen daemons seem to start. Next up is getting the network bridge set up. Anyone want to save me some time and provide a pointer to a domU VM config & image to try out? Am I correct in understanding that to mean Xen is booting on bare metal then booting unRAID as a VM? Wasn't the purpose of adding the VM related stuff, to the unRAID kernel, to make unRAID the bare metal kernel that would be hosting other VM's? No. Dom0 is the host. Tom, just go grab one grumpys vhd files if you want a quick and dirty test though without a bridge its not gona be pretty. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
butlerpeter Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 -beta3 status: Got Xen hypervisor kernel (ver 4.3.1) booting off flash, which then chain-boots unRaid OS 6 dom0. All the Xen daemons seem to start. Next up is getting the network bridge set up. Anyone want to save me some time and provide a pointer to a domU VM config & image to try out? Am I correct in understanding that to mean Xen is booting on bare metal then booting unRAID as a VM? Wasn't the purpose of adding the VM related stuff, to the unRAID kernel, to make unRAID the bare metal kernel that would be hosting other VM's? No. Dom0 is the host. Tom, just go grab one grumpys vhd files if you want a quick and dirty test though without a bridge its not gona be pretty. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk So in Tom's example - what is running on the bare metal - the Xen kernel or the unRAID kernel? Or are they the same thing? Apologies for going off topic - thought I understood where things were heading, then I thought I'd misunderstood and now I'm clueless Quote Link to comment
TheDragon Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 -beta3 status: Got Xen hypervisor kernel (ver 4.3.1) booting off flash, which then chain-boots unRaid OS 6 dom0. All the Xen daemons seem to start. Next up is getting the network bridge set up. Anyone want to save me some time and provide a pointer to a domU VM config & image to try out? Am I correct in understanding that to mean Xen is booting on bare metal then booting unRAID as a VM? Wasn't the purpose of adding the VM related stuff, to the unRAID kernel, to make unRAID the bare metal kernel that would be hosting other VM's? No. Dom0 is the host. Tom, just go grab one grumpys vhd files if you want a quick and dirty test though without a bridge its not gona be pretty. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk So in Tom's example - what is running on the bare metal - the Xen kernel or the unRAID kernel? Or are they the same thing? Apologies for going off topic - thought I understood where things were heading, then I thought I'd misunderstood and now I'm clueless I'm certainly not an expert on this, but from what I understand the unRAID Kernel is running on the host with the required Xen modules installed and activated on boot. Hope that's the right terminology... sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong! Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
ironicbadger Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 Sounds about right to me. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
madburg Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 I recall that 6.0 was supposed to be for a lack of better words the 64 bit counter part of 5.0 to help us with memory management. I do understand some variation, but this seems that it has forked completely off that premise, no? Looking more like a 6.1beta. I think this is all cool, but we lost the 64 bit counterpart, Tom will be so busy with all these virtual layers and new samba, etc. I am sure many would have appreciated the 64 bit counter part to 5.0 first, fix and learn from it as the first pass and pick these additions back up in a 6.1 beta. Quote Link to comment
mattkhan Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 dom0 is explained on the xen wiki - http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Dom0 Quote Link to comment
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