Blog posts tagged with 'xen'
And it's FREE! Throw away those behemoths that suck power from every grid in the state and drain your budget. This baby is Free, Open Source and VIRTUAL, meaning you can run as many instances of this router as you want on your choice of hardware. What is even more gratifying is it's faster than the old router technology.
Vyatta has commoditized router, firewall and VPN deployment in the same way that Linux commoditized the operating system market. Vyatta open-source networking offers you an alternative to over-priced, inflexible products from proprietary vendors.
Vyatta software enables customers to build routing and security solutions using standard x86-based hardware of their choosing, ensuring networks will always meet performance requirements. Vyatta open-source software delivers the unique advantage of allowing customers to scale networks from the simplest LAN configurations to large BGP WAN edge configurations using a single software package.
Vyatta software includes support for most commonly used network interfaces, industry standard routing and management protocols, and all of these features are configurable via a single command-line interface (CLI) or web-based graphical user interface (GUI) - avail Q3'08. The integrated features and functionality make Vyatta software ideal for SMB, Branch Office, Enterprise and Service Provider deployments.
Summary of features:
BGP, OSPF, RIP, DHCP, QoS, IPSec VPN, VRRP, PPP, 802.1Q, Complete List.
This open source router is already running on XenServer in a large service provider in Europe. We are using it in our Citrix Ready program as a multi-link Intranet with connections to the Internet along with high availability link load balancing.
This para-virtualized Vyatta image runs as a virtual appliance in XenServer v3.2.1 and v4.1.
The XenServer Platform we are using:
- Dell Poweredge 2950 server.
- 2 x Intel 64-bit Quad-Core Xeon Processors, Model E5335 @ 2.00 GHz each, for a total of 8 CPUs.
- 2 Intel 82571EB Gigabit Ethernet (on-board)
- 2 Broadcom NetXtremeII Gigabit Ethernet
- 16 GB of memory.
- 300 GB of Storage.
- XenServer v4.1
- *note: CPU's must support virtualization technology.
Virtual Router - Install:
Virtual Router - Config:
Tap into the power of AppExpert.
XenCenter has a simple and intuitive UI. However when problems happen, the log tab sometimes doesn't contain enough information to help with debugging the issues. I found it very useful to take a look at the debug log in %appdata%\Citrix\XenCenter\logs\XenCenter.log. For example, the log file may be in C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Citrix\XenCenter\logs directory. Please note that Application Data directory may be hidden.
Here is an example of what's contained in the log:
...
2008-06-10 10:02:05,579 INFO Audit [Main program thread] - Operation started: ImportVmAction: pdxen2: Pool 95e79feb-a2fd-f744-8f03-a47ce57a2d2e (): Host 817c97de-2b6d-4670-a00d-0dcccff42531 (pdxen2): Preparing to Import VM
2008-06-10 10:02:06,016 DEBUG XenAdmin.Actions.ImportVmAction [7428] - Importing Rio-style XVA from C:\XenVm\Auto-Win2K3-R2-SP2-32bit-TS-IIS-.NET-SysPrep.xva to SR 10.2.248.123_local
2008-06-10 10:02:06,016 DEBUG XenAdmin.Actions.ImportVmAction [7428] - SR is not shared -- redirecting to 10.2.248.123
2008-06-10 10:02:06,016 DEBUG XenAdmin.Actions.ImportVmAction [7428] - Using https://10.2.248.123:443/import?session_id=OpaqueRef%3A4769e023-7c64-ca54-f6e0-e257b8be522f&sr_id=OpaqueRef%3A2fc1e3d8-0763-0099-7151-98f4610f37b1 for import
2008-06-10 10:02:06,063 DEBUG XenAdmin.Network.HTTP [7428] - HTTP PUTTING file from C:\XenVm\Auto-Win2K3-R2-SP2-32bit-TS-IIS-.NET-SysPrep.xva to https://10.2.248.123/import?session_id=OpaqueRef:4769e023-7c64-ca54-f6e0-e257b8be522f&sr_id=OpaqueRef:2fc1e3d8-0763-0099-7151-98f4610f37b1&task_id=OpaqueRef:1160c6fb-4a03-39c4-3336-0973573958c2
2008-06-10 10:02:25,469 DEBUG XenAdmin.Actions.AsyncAction [Main program thread] - AsyncAction.Cancel() was called. Attempting to cancel action
| Is this debug tip helpful | Choose |
|---|---|
| Yes |  |
| No | |
GUS PINTO: It's noticeable the steady growth of conversations around virtualization within organizations and in the Internet today, more specifically around server and desktop virtualization.
Microsoft is readying up Hyper-V, and a lot of technologies to allow these technologies to actually happen for the large enterprise. It's going into market in partnership with Citrix and its Xen Hypervisor.
I guess the question is, what is your true feeling about virtualization in the enterprise on the server and desktop base? Is this just really hype or is this something you guys truly believe is going to happen?
RAY OZZIE: No, it's absolutely fundamental. It is absolutely going to happen.
I would say you have to take desktops separately. The logic behind virtualization on the desktop is completely separate from what it would be on the server, and in some ways it's different within the on-premises world versus the cloud. So, I'll just touch upon those independently.
Before I do that, though, let me just say that from a TS perspective, Terminal Server based deployment will always be more efficient than virtualization. It was a designed-in, multi-tenant model within the OS. So, if there are applications and solutions that fit the TS model, that's just a terrific model to use, and I would encourage organizations to use that model.
Within the enterprise, virtualization, the simplest and most straightforward way is to just make the best use of the datacenter resources that you can from a consolidation perspective. This is we are absolutely taking it seriously.
There are two phases of that consolidation. Phase one is bringing things together, meaning if you have a scale-up cluster or a scale-up, some expensive configuration of hardware, how can you package much usage on that piece of hardware as you can? The other one is then movement of images amongst the different machines within the back-end. You'll see investments progressively from us in both of those realms.
Taken to the extreme within the cloud, virtualization is absolutely critical. Virtualization is key to making the best use and securely isolating properties from multiple customers that might not use even a full inexpensive CPU, and moving them geographically or whatever to provide resilience and robustness. So, it is something that's extremely important.
On the client I'll only say that the uses of it, the way that the Mac uses it to run Windows and stuff, it's clever. Parallels, they're very clever technologies.
The way that you'll see us take advantage of it over time more and more on the client is our mechanisms around ensuring compatibility. App compat is a very, very challenging thing, and you want to continue to make progress with the operating system. We look to it as another tool in the toolbox to try to help in the compat world without -- enabling innovation while still enabling assurance of compatibility.
~snip~
I will be posting the Video with Q&A shortly.
Gus Pinto - Technology Evangelist
Microsoft MVP | gus.pinto@citrix.com
Last month I posted about Ian Pratt's presentation on the Xen Open Source Hypervisor at the FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developer's European Meeting) Conference. FOSDEM has posted videos of all the sessions. As the one of the primary founders of the Xen Open Source Hypervisor Project, Ian has unique insight into the Xen Project. http://video.fosdem.org/2008/maintracks/FOSDEM2008-xen.ogg
Ian Pratt
, one of the founders of the Xen Project, recently gave an inteview at FOSDEM.org about his recent talk at the FOSDEM 2008 conference. FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting.
Here are a few snippets from the interview.
Last time, XenSource was not yet acquired by Citrix. What were the reasons to consider this sale?
I think we were doing pretty well as XenSource, but one of the challenges we faced is that it takes time to build a 'sales channel' to distribute software. Citrix already have a great sales channel, so the acquisition provided a great opportunity to take Xen to the mass-market.
What kind of open-source commitment do you expect from Citrix?
Citrix have been great in supporting the open source side of things, funding folk to work full-time on open source Xen, and also funding a full time Xen programme manager. The management understand the importance of a strong Xen community and the need for the project's independence from Citrix's own Xen products.
The change was always going to make some members of the community nervous (just like when we originally formed XenSource), but it's the same group of people and we intend to carry on just as before. One difference is that we now have 'xen.org' to provide a clear independent identity for the Xen project, and also the Xen Advisory Board to help govern the project.
How does Xen's future look on Windows platforms?
Lots of people use Xen to run Windows VMs -- after all, Windows arguably needs virtualization more than Unix OSes. I reckon that something like over 80% of the VMs running on XenServer are Windows.
You can read the entire interview at the FOSDEM.org site
. In the past FOSDEM events, videos of the talks have been posted. None of the 2008 talks are posted yet, but soon you should be able to download the video of the entire talk by Ian Pratt at the FOSDEM video site. UPDATE: You can now download a pdf of Ian's presentation at FOSDEM.org here.
While looking at the referring sites in the blog metrics for an earlier post,I just came across a site for a new Xen book called "Running Xen". This book is written by a member of the faculty (Jeanna Neefe Matthews) and several grad students (including a current IBMer) at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY. The book is primarily focused on the open source hypervisor, but there is additional content on Citrix XenServer as well.
Here is a description of the book from the website -
We began using Xen in Fall 2003 soon after reading the paper "Xen and the Art of Virtualization" published in the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). After attending SOSP and talking to some of the authors, Jeanna Matthews returned excited about Xen. She and her graduate operating systems course at Clarkson University decided to repeat and extend the results reported in that paper. That class included two of the co-authors for this book, Eli Dow (currently at IBM) and Todd Deshane (currently completing his Ph.D.), who were both studying for their Master's degrees at the time. In the process of repeating the results from the 2003 Xen paper, we learned a lot about running Xen - much of it the hard way! Our goal for this book was to write exactly the material we wished was available when we first started using Xen.
In July 2004, we published the paper "Xen and the Art of Repeated Research" describing our experience with Xen and presenting the results we obtained repeating and extending the results. All the authors, in addition to being a part of the Fall 2003 graduate operating systems course, were also members of the Applied Computing Laboratories at Clarkson University specifically the Clarkson Open Source Institute (COSI) and the Clarkson Internet Teaching Laboratory (ITL). These labs were founded to provide students with hands-on experience with cutting-edge computing technologies and to form a community in which everyone both learns and teaches. Other students in the labs - both graduate and undergraduate - began to use Xen as the basis for both production systems and for research projects. Through the years, we have used Xen as the basis for a number of academic papers as well as the basis of award winning team projects. In the process, we have learned a lot about running Xen. It is our goal in this book to share this knowledge with you and to make your experience running Xen as smooth and simple as possible.
Here is the chapter list from the site -
- Chapter 1 - Xen: Background and Virtualization Basics
- Chapter 2 - A Quick Tour with the Xen LiveCD
- Chapter 3 - The Xen Hypervisor
- Chapter 4 - Hardware Requirements and Installation of Xen Dom0
- Chapter 5 - Using Prebuilt Guest Images
- Chapter 6 - Managing Unprivileged Domains
- Chapter 7 - Populating Guest Images
- Chapter 8 - Storing Guest Images
- Chapter 9 - Device Virtualization and Management
- Chapter 10 - Network Configuration
- Chapter 11 - Securing a Xen System
- Chapter 12 - Managing Guest Resources
- Chapter 13 - Guest Save, Restore, and Migration
- Chapter 14 - Xen in the Enterprise: A Brief Survey
- Appendix A - Resources
- Appendix B - The xm command
- Appendix C - Xend Configuration Parameters
- Appendix D - Guest Configuration Parameters
- Appendix E - Xen Performance Evaluation
The Running Xen web site has a page with multiple sites where the book can be purchased here. If you get the book and read it (or already have) I would love to hear your feedback in the comments.
Anyone interested in learning more about the open source Xen solution built by the community at Xen.org can attend the North American Xen Summit in Boston, MA, June 23 - 24 as part of the USENIX 2008 Annual Technical Conference. The USENIX event is from June 22 - 27 with training sessions from the 22 - 24 and a conference from the 25 - 27. Plans are underway to host a day long Xen training session for the 22nd and include sessions from Xen Summit in the USENIX conference. A discount will also be offered to all Xen Summit attendees interested in going to the USENIX Annual Technical Conference.
More information on the event and registration information will be available soon; in the mean time, mark your calendars. Also, a European Xen Summit is also in the plans for later this year in London. Stay tuned...
For those of you working with Xen 3.1, be aware that Xen 3.2 is now launched and available at xen.org.
===============================================================
CALL FOR PAPERS
3rd Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cluster and Grid Computing (VHPC'08)
as part of Euro-Par 2008, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Island, Spain
===============================================================
Date: August 26-29, 2008
Euro-Par 2008: http://europar2008.caos.uab.es/ Workshop URL: http://xhpc.wu-wien.ac.at
SUBMISSION DEADLINE:
Abstracts: February 4, 2008
Full Paper: April 14, 2008
Scope:
Virtual machine monitors (VMMs) are becoming tightly integrated with standard OS distributions, leading to increased adoption in many application areas including scientific educational and high-performance computing (HPC). VMMs allow for the concurrent execution of potentially large numbers of virtual machines, providing encapsulation, isolation, and the possibility for migrating VMs between physical hosts. These features enable physical clusters to be treated as "computation pools", where a variety of execution environments can be dynamically instantiated on the underlying hardware. VM technology is therefore opening up new architectures and services for HPC in cluster and grid environments, but consensus has not yet emerged on the best models and tools. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on virtualization in HPC environments, with the goal of sharing experience and promoting the development of a research community in this emerging area.
The workshop will be one day in length, composed of 20 min paper presentations, each followed by 10 min discussion sections.
Presentations may be accompanied by interactive demonstrations.
The workshop will also include a 30 min panel discussion by presenters.
TOPICS
Topics include, but are not limited to, the following subject matters:
- Virtualization in cluster and grid environments
- Workload characterizations for VM-based clusters
- VM cluster and grid architectures
- Cluster reliability, fault-tolerance, and security
- Compute job entry and scheduling
- Compute workload load leveling
- Cluster and grid filesystems for VMs
- VMMs, VMs and QoS guarantees
- Research and education use cases
- VM cluster distribution algorithms
- MPI, PVM on virtual machines
- System sizing
- Hardware support for virtualization
- High-speed interconnects in hypervisors
- Hypervisor extensions and utilities for cluster and grid computing
- Network architectures for VM-based clusters
- VMMs/Hypervisors on large SMP machines
- Performance models
- Performance management and tuning hosts and guest VMs
- Power considerations
- VMM performance tuning on various load types
- Xen/other VMM cluster/grid tools
- High-speed Device access from VMs
- Management, deployment of clusters and grid environments with VMs
- Information systems for virtualized clusters
- Management of system images for virtual machines
- Integration with relevant standards e.g. CIM, GLUE, OGF, etc.
PAPER SUBMISSION
Papers submitted to each workshop will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee and external reviewers. Submissions should include abstract, key words, the e-mail address of the corresponding author, and must not exceed 10 pages, including tables and figures at a main font size no smaller than 11 point. Submission of a paper should be regarded as a commitment that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will register and attend the conference to present the work.
Accepted papers will be published in the Springer LNCS series - the format must be according to the Springer LNCS Style. Initial submissions are in PDF, accepted papers will be requested to provided source files.
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
Submission Link:
http://www.edas.info/newPaper.php?c=6123&
IMPORTANT DATES
February 4, 2008 - Abstract submissions due Full paper submission due: April 14, 2008 Acceptance notification: May 3, 2008 Camera-ready due: May 26, 2008
Conference: August 26-29, 2008
CHAIR
Michael Alexander (chair), WU Vienna, Austria Stephen Childs (co-chair), Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Jussara Almeida, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brasil Padmashree Apparao, Intel Corp., US Hassan Barada, Etisalat University College, UAE Volker Buege, University of Karlsruhe, Germany, Simon Crosby, Xensource, UK Marcus Hardt, Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany Sverre Jarp, CERN, Switzerland Krishna Kant, Intel Corporation, US Yves Kemp, University of Karlsruhe, Germany Naoya Maruyama, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan Jean-Marc Menaud, Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France José E. Moreira, IBM Watson Research Center, US Yoshio Turner, HP Labs Andreas Unterkircher, CERN, Switzerland Dongyan Xu, Purdue University, US
GENERAL INFORMATION
The workshop will be held as part of Euro-Par 2008, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Island, Spain.
Euro-Par 2008: http://europar2008.caos.uab.es/
There's been a lot of noise recently about the complexities of patch management in a virtualized world -- a lot of jockeying for last place, as it were, in the "Whose Patch Tuesday is Biggest" contest.
XenServer has had a relatively small number of patches, and in the case of security advisories, we've been consistently able to announce the fix for an issue very quickly, or in one case, even before the vulnerability was publicized.
But it's true that virtual platforms can add complexity to patch management. While other Citrix technologies -- Provisioning Server, for instance -- can reduce the impact of patching significantly, the maintenance of the virtualization server platform itself is an major concern.
We don't talk about future features very often, but here's one area of the next release of Citrix XenServer -- which is in closed beta with Citrix employees and partners now -- that is worth crowing about.
Pool-wide patch management has been integrated into the product, and, in conjunction with a wizard in XenCenter, will allow you to:
- Check the Citrix XenServer website for updates
- Download any pending updates to your XenCenter system
- Choose which servers in your managed pools you wish to apply the patches to
- Put each server in maintenance mode (with their VMs kept online on another server via XenMotion)
- Apply the patches
- Bring the server back online and move VMs back to it automatically
...All in a single guided process.
Just another step to help you feel more secure about security (and stability and performance and manageability).
Watch the web for public beta availability and more info.
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