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We were unable to find any info googling. It appears you cannot boot a Paravirtualized DomU directly to CD-ROM? So we temporarily changed our Paravirtual Xen DomU to boot from HVM or Full Virtual Machine. Our environment has Xen running on HVM capable hardware (we can run Full Virtualization) with LVM Block devices for disks. Our Paravirtual DomU is called guest-1 First backup your Running Xen config. Save it to /etc/xen/vm/guest-1.run xm list -l guest-1 >/etc/xen/vm/guest-1.run You will use this file later on. Novell’s documentation on how to save Running Xen DomU config. http://www.novell.com/documentation/vmserver/pdfdoc/config_options/config_options.pdf Look for “Virtual Machine Settings”. I found it easier to modify the startup config in /etc/xen/vm/guest-1 than modify the file that is outputted from the Novell Running config backup. Backup the original Startup config (I believe this file gets created when you first build a new VM in virt-manager.)
Does anyone know of Best Practices for virtual machine backups? Is there anything published? Is there a need to define best practices for XenServer backups? !!!See script details in thread!!!!
The xen-vm-autosnapshot.py script has been updated with an important new option: –snapshot-tag. I still can’t believe I made such a silly oversight, but previous versions of this script had no way of differentiating between snapshots created automatically and those that were created manually. So if you happened to have some old manual snapshots lying around, the snapshot-rotate routine would have rotated them along with all the rest.
backing up your xen domains posted february 10th, 2008 by john in debian etch tech xen backups are boring, but we all know how important they are. backups can also be quite powerful when working with xen virtualization, since xen allows for convenient back-up and restore of entire systems. i've recently been working on a flexible, general-purpose script enabling incremental backups of complete xen guests, optimized for secure, distributed environments
What is StorageLink? Citrix StorageLink™ technology lets your virtual server infrastructures fully leverage all the resources and functionality of existing storage systems. StorageLink supports third party storage architectures and delivers deep integration with leading storage platforms.
he following will install and configure DRBD, OpenAIS, Pacemaker and Xen on OpenSUSE 11.1 to provide highly-available virtual machines. This setup does not utilize Xen's live migration capabilities. Instead, VMs will be started on the secondary node as soon as failure of the primary is detected. Xen virtual disk images are replicated between nodes using DRBD and all services on the cluster will be managed by OpenAIS and Pacemaker. The following setup utilizes DRBD 8.3.2 and Pacemaker 1.0.4. It is important to note that DRBD 8.3.2 has come a long way since previous versions in terms of compatibility with Pacemaker. In particular, a new DRBD OCF resource agent script and new DRBD-level resource fencing features. This configuration will not work with older releases of DRBD.
Re: How migrate vmware guest to xen Hi, It's possible with the qemu tools Install the qemu package (which is available from the OpenSuSE Build Service) and use the following command: qemu-img convert -f vmdk /path/to/vm01.vmdk -O raw /tmp/xenimage.raw This will create a raw disk which can be used with xen from a VMware vmdk disk.
VMware to xen migration German original: http://www.eisxen.org/49.html To convert a Linux VMWare Image to a normal image, below the most important commands: install qemu convert the VMware image to a RAW-Image qemu-img convert -f vmdk /var/vmware/vm/vm01.vmdk \ -O raw /tmp/vmimage.raw A vmware imange is a containerfile. The partitions have to be spilt up to individual images for xen. To find out what is in the VMware image, take a look with: fdisk -l -u /home/xen/vmimage.raw Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System linux1 * 63 208844 104391 83 Linux linux2 208845 7550549 3670852 83 Linux linux3 7550550 8193149 321300 82 Linux swap I presume there are already some lvm’s available. Now use the command below a couple times to extract them dd if=vmimage.raw of=/dev/vg01/xendomU01slash bs=512 skip=208845 count=7341705 Of course, check the result (with a (loop)mount)
The "Virtual Machine Manager" application (virt-manager for short package name) is a desktop user interface for managing virtual machines. It presents a summary view of running domains, their live performance
Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager) has reached release 0.8 which includes a new graphical wizards for cloning disk images adding devices to existing VMs, and a new system tray icon. Virtual Machine Manager is a desktop app for managing virtual machines. It summarises running VMs and their performance and resource utilisation statistics. The enhancements that come with virt-manager 0.8.0 include a new “Clone VM” wizard, an improved user interface that includes an overhaul of the main view and a system tray icon for easier VM access and control. Also new is a wizard for adding serial, parallel and video devices to existing VMs, CPU pinning support, the ability to view and change VM security settings and “many bug fixes and improvements”.
Migrating SLES from VMWare ESX to XenServer For SuSE Linux Enterprise Server I require a “Helper” virtual machine to mount and repair the file system. This is because SLES recovery console does not include an editor. After migrating SuSE and booting the boot loader fails at: “waiting for device /dev/sda2.” This is as expected because /sda refers to a SCSI bus and on XenServer SuSE actually sees an /hda (IDE) boot device.
Currently, there is no support for providing automatic remote access to filesystems stored on local disk when a domain is migrated. Administrators should choose an appropriate storage solution (i.e. SAN, NAS, etc.) to ensure that domain filesystems are also available on their destination node. GNBD is a good method for exporting a volume from one machine to another. iSCSI can do a similar job, but is more complex to set up.