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Moey posted:Does anyone really prefer XenServer over vSphere? I use XenServer pretty extensively. I've used Citrix products for quite a while. Their last release, XenServer 6.1 is a pile of poo poo. I would normally recommend them if you could use the money between that and VMware for other things (like a SAN, etc.) XenServer does require you to offline a VM to expand the virtual disk. It can be done through the GUI under Storage, click the disk, Properties. What you've posted is how to expand the datastore. As far as I know, you still have to do that via command line.
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Mar 29, 2013 00:46
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Yeah, that doesn't sound right. What storage?
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Apr 9, 2013 03:49
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Misogynist posted:This is really common and well-documented behavior when you do a block-level copy of a VMFS datastore. When VMFS metadata is written onto a volume, one of the pieces of information that's written for recordkeeping is the NAA ID of the LUN that the datastore was created on. (In the olden days before NAA support was common, it stored the LUN number instead.) Interesting. Thanks for the insight. I haven't done a block level copy of a VMFS datastore before. Always done a svmotion. Was thinking about the LUNs I've done that with in Windows and haven't had a problem.
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Apr 9, 2013 20:20
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Moey posted:There is no 32 bit version of R2. I'm fairly sure he knows that.
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Apr 30, 2013 12:02
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I can only speak for XenServer, and not at the level of a hosting environment, but being tied to the UUID sounds really weird. I'm not even sure you can query the UUID of the VM from within a guest. The UUID is tied to the VM object. So the only way the UUID should change is if the VM object changes. One way would be if the virtual disk was removed and then added to a new VM. Another would be if if it was exported and then imported to be moved to a new pool. I can't really think of any other ways the UUID of a VM would change.
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May 1, 2013 23:36
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If they had extended downtime I would guess they moved it to a new pool or had some issues that required recreating or resetting VM objects. I meant to see if the XenServer VM UUID matched the value from the WMI info, but I didn't have time to test today and gently caress logging back into work.
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May 3, 2013 02:29
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People assigning the wrong vCPU amounts for the job drive me up a wall. I work for an MSP and a ton of our environments are set to 8 vCPU on all the VMs. Slowly getting around to changing them.
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May 22, 2013 00:50
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fougera posted:I noticed a lot of complaints about Citrix's bugginess and wanted to hear more perspectives on Citrix vs. VMWare vs. Hyper-V. Do you think the bugs and learning curve for Citrix make the other brands a better option overall (understanding that it varies with use cases)? Are there certain things about Citrix you like that the others don't have? Apologies for being vague, I'm trying to learn more about the underlying technology and the business and would rather hear a CIO's/user's opinion rather than read some industry analyst's. It's a very big topic so I'm not exactly what type of feedback you're looking for. Everything Citrix does lacks polish, whether it is XenServer, XenApp, or XenDesktop. Sometimes the features make up for it. For example, I would much rather admin a XenApp farm over a Remote Desktop Services farm. I would much rather use XenDesktop than VMware View. On XenServer, I would not say there are any features that make me want to use it over VMware. I would suggest it as more of a low cost alternative. Can you afford the VMware licensing and a SAN that will perform and meet your needs? Great, get VMware and a SAN. Can you not afford both? Get XenServer and a SAN. Do not go the route of VMware and no SAN, because that is dumb. If you own licenses for XenApp and XenDesktop, you can run all the Citrix infrastructure on the Enterprise / Platinum / Whatever version of XenServer that matches your XenApp / XenDesktop licensing. You can technically run all of your infrastructure on it, there is nothing stopping you, but it is not licenses properly. That said, I have never heard of anyone catching any flack for it. XenServer is based on the open source Xen, which is still open source, but Citrix bought a major contributor, XenSource in 2007. XenServer 5.0 was fairly hairy. I felt 5.6 was much better and much more mature. 6.0 was not bad either. I am very disappointed in my experiences with XenServer 6.1, and I have spoken to several Citrix folks who have said they are warning people not to upgrade to 6.1. Not sure if that is official policy or if that has changed with the recent hotfixes. I actually prefer XenServer's pool-based master approach to vSphere's single management server, but I could see arguments for both. All that said, I do not get to dive deep into virtualization every day. My role has always been a jack of all trades. You will definitely find more detailed information if you research it.
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Jun 18, 2013 23:35
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I think it I'm is a cool idea for a practical test, but keep in mind phone interviews are just as much about checking to see if someone can talk the talks as well. Which as you know is important for MSPs or consultants.
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Aug 8, 2013 02:39
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I've been a Citrix sysadmin for 8+ years and have used XenServer for probably 4 of those years. It has gotten to the point where I cannot recommend XenServer as an alternative to VMware. The polish on the products is abysmal, they are still far behind on features, their documentation is garbage, and their support is garbage. XenServer 6.1 was (and is still) such a mess, that I find it hard to be excited about them open sourcing 6.2. I can't tell if that's them giving up, or recognizing that they need to change strategy. One simple example is that you cannot resize a disk on an online VM in XenServer. This limitation even carries over into AWS, where to resize a disk you literally have to offline the VM, take a snapshot of the disk, then deploy a new disk from the snapshot while selecting an increased capacity. In the year 2013. How long has VMware had the capability to do online resizing of disks? A long drat time, that's how long.
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Aug 31, 2013 17:48
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Is there anything out there similar to Citrix's Provisioning Services? That is one technology I miss working with at my new job. So very useful.
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Sep 5, 2013 04:01
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three posted:Also, if you're not using vCheck then you should. Does anyone know if this is possible to use on non-vSphere ESXi hosts? I looked, but it doesn't seem possible.
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Sep 7, 2013 00:32
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No scheduled scans, scan on write only not read.
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Sep 25, 2013 23:22
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diremonk posted:I have a strange question. I have a client that is needing to buy a new server. The issue is that the application he needs to run on it will only run under 32-bit windows which for a server seems like a bad idea, at least from a RAM standpoint. So I'm suggesting to him that create a virtual 32 bit system on his new 64-bit box either using Virtualbox or probably VMware. That is pretty much what virtualization was meant for, but it sounds like you may be in over your head. You definitely don't want to use Virtualbox. You want ESXi, HyperV, or XenServer. And if you're talking about buying a new server, it should not have a Core i series chip in it.
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Oct 17, 2013 12:34
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Citrix products generally have great features, but are difficult to deploy and admin properly. Like you said, three, most Citrix admins are terrible. I have a couple of XenApp/XenDesktop/XenServer environments that I am involved with, but because we are a small MSP they were set up wrong and time has never been taken to fix them. It's really frustrating because I had a decent sized Citrix environment that I implemented and administered before coming to work here, and it was great. I really miss Provisioning Services.
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Nov 10, 2013 00:26
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We use free ESXi for pretty much all of our clients. You can still manage pretty much everything in the client still these days. Most of the features that are in the Web client only are geared towards vCenter deployments.
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Dec 8, 2013 13:35
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I don't see any way of them avoiding releasing a "free vCenter" as a virtual center appliance, unless they are planning on running web and management within ESXi itself, which I highly doubt will happen.
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Dec 9, 2013 01:22
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I have been debating the same thing at work since we use a lot of ESXi free without vCenter. I thought about the whole running a webserver within ESXi but figured you guys wouldn't want to do that. Why not just have a basic web VM that gets installed by default and acts like a free version of vCenter for the purposes of managing through the Web interface? I'd have to imagine the vCenter appliance would provide a decent head start on the programming.
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Jan 11, 2014 02:23
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DevNull, since you are active tonight I have a question for you. What impact does EMC have on your day to day? I'm been nothing but frustrated when supporting EMC products, but VMware seems fairly "workable" in comparison. Just curious as to what you guys run into. EMC seems like the definition of bureaucracy.
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Jan 11, 2014 05:14
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:XenServer, it's free and works. Has some minor qwerks but it does work. Please don't use XenServer unless you really know your poo poo. I have been using XenServer for a pretty long time, probably about 6 years or so, and it has really gone downhill. It has more features, but it is buggy and unstable as gently caress. I have had nothing but issues with them since they released 6.1. I have spent a ton of hours this year troubleshooting serious XenServer stuff, all stemming from bugs in their product. In fact, I'm up at 6am on a Sunday restoring a VM from backup because another issue with XenServer. If you look at this thread or previous iterations, you'll see I recommended XenServer as an alternative if you can't afford both real VMware licenses and a SAN. At this point, VMware is too cheap and XenServer is too unstable. I would honestly look at Hyper-V before I considered another XenServer deployment.
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Mar 2, 2014 13:01
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His Divine Shadow posted:I was thinking I'd run our websites of one VM and the mailserver of the other VM. Maybe run apache in a third linux VM. My suggestion would be to use RAID 10 and skip the shared storage unless you are going to have multiple hosts. Just make sure you are taking image based backups so you can easily restore to some random ESXi box if your current host fails. I would store those backups on a cheap NAS.
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Mar 13, 2014 12:43
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You want a serial to IP converter. Something like this http://www.lantronix.com/device-networking/external-device-servers/uds1100.html
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Apr 22, 2014 02:02
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I'm no virtualization Guru but I can't think of any changes I make to 2008 R2 other than installing the VMware / XenServer tools.
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Jul 11, 2014 13:24
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Sure, I'll take the bait from the guy arguing you should tweak Windows 2008 R2 for virtualization... What is the equivalent of PVS in the View world that works better?
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Jul 13, 2014 04:00
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Been a while since I worked with both but PVS can load the whole image into memory, eliminating any IOPs from frequently reading the image. In one part of your post you say with SSDs it doesn't matter, then the next you say you should tweak for every last IOP. What is it? And what are these tweaks you do on Windows 2008 R2? People have asked several times. And reducing reliance on PXE to reduce complexity? Really? How often do you have issues with PXE?
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Jul 13, 2014 04:26
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I agree 100% about that. Citrix definitely doesn't do themselves any favors in that department. They can't do consistency to save their lives.
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Jul 13, 2014 04:55
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Still waiting to hear what mysterious "depends on the client" Windows 2008 R2 tweaks we're supposed to be making.
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Jul 15, 2014 03:29
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FISHMANPET posted:Dell can do it either way. They can sell it OEM so that your support goes through them, or they can just be a VMware reseller. Although one interesting slightly related fact, Dell will support you with your ESXi questions even if you bought it with Windows on it.
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Jul 19, 2014 02:43
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I don't think there is any way to do what you're asking. You need storage to copy to.
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Aug 26, 2014 15:15
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As annoying as I find DaF's posting and as much as I appreciate NippleFloss's insight, I wouldn't call updating SAN firmware mundane and boring. Yeah, it mostly works, but lets be honest here who hasn't had a firmware upgrade blow up in their faces? I have had EQL, EMC VNX, and HP LeftHand firmware upgrades all go south and cause unexpected downtime. Hell, quite a while ago in this thread I was saying I update firmware on SANs I touch fairly often, and almost everyone else came out to say don't touch it if it isn't broken. If it is so easy / fail-proof, why was everyone voting for "don't touch it"? I actually just got done installing the Dell OpenManage VIB on an ESXi 5.5 Update 1 host. Done it a million times. This server rebooted and couldn't find its hard drives. Had nothing to do with the VIB, but made my day longer than it should have been. Sometimes poo poo just breaks when you reboot it.
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Nov 29, 2014 03:41
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They're generally a little more advanced than that, but the basic gist is the same.
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Nov 29, 2014 03:46
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Mr Shiny Pants posted:Install Windows 8 and use HyperV? Do you have a SSD in it? This is good advice. Especially about the SSD. How many cores are you currently giving each VM? For what you're talking about 1 vCPU per would probably be best.
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Dec 3, 2014 14:32
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Knighty21 posted:I'm currently assigning 4 cores to each box (I was giving two cores to each when my host had 4 cores + HT so figured doubling them on this host made sense). Could this actually be hurting performance? Changing them to 1 vCPU per should make a world of difference. WinXP should do fine enough. Going to Win7 or even Win8 would help as they do a little better with slower IO. Sounds like you are fine on RAM. If they were created in VirtualBox it shouldn't matter where they originally came from. Try the 1 vCPU bit first and go from there. Should be a pretty big improvement.
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Dec 4, 2014 00:55
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How is everyone dealing with antivirus on non-persistent VDIs these days? In the past I've just installed AV on the VDI and changed the definition path to a cache drive, but I'd like to do it a bit cleaner. Is anyone using hypervisor AV? VDIs are currently on XenServer but I am probably going to migrate them to ESXi and it can wait until then.
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Dec 9, 2014 18:56
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adorai posted:In fact we went with VMware over XenServer for our XenDesktop deployment because of the vshield driver. It works pretty well and I would recommend it, with the caveat that it does stop working occasionally so i drop a test file on a guest of each hypervisor from time to time just to make sure it's working. Thanks for the response. I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but it looks like VMware vShield is essentially a framework that other AV vendors can leverage, is that correct? If so, which vendors do you guys have experience with? Or am I misunderstanding?
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Dec 10, 2014 05:36
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Awesome, thanks for the details. The disk bit is interesting. Makes you wonder why they don't intercept the disk IO and scan it. Sounds like I have a bit of reading to do. Thanks again for the follow up.
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Dec 10, 2014 05:54
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adorai posted:most disk io is coming from or going to memory. All the real time stuff works, it's just a scheduled disk scan that you lose. Ah, okay. Cool. Like I said, definitely going to have to do some more reading. I'm not concerned about losing the scheduled disk scans. Thanks!
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Dec 10, 2014 06:12
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It's a BIOS setting if your BIOS doesn't support allowing VMware to handle it. It's a host setting if your BIOS allows VMware to handle it. And yes, always configure your iDRAC and for the love of god install the OpenManage VIB for ESXi while you're at it. I ran into a fun performance issue the other day... Guest showing really high CPU usage but not any one process. Super high Co-Stop on the VMs in vSphere, which I've only ever seen for over-allocated vCPU on hosts or old snapshots causing problems, neither of which were the issue here. Some idiot went into the settings for each VM and set the max memory limit for the VM to be lower than the amount of memory the VM was given. They were swapping like crazy. Never even thought to check there.
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Dec 17, 2014 02:05
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I'm fairly sure that OpenManage for ESXi will tell you the BIOS power management settings, but installing it requires a reboot anyways. I would use the reboot window to install it.
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Dec 17, 2014 03:10
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Moey posted:I thought it could be hard set in the bios, or turned to "guest os control"? Yes, that is what I was trying to say earlier. Depending on the vendor the verbage can change. You can hard set it in UEFI/BIOS or you can set UEFI/BIOS to allow the OS to manage it, which ESXi supports.
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Dec 17, 2014 06:24
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