Playing with XenServer in my testlab (basically as a VM in VMware Workstation hah!) I ran into trouble while\u00a0creating a Machine Catalog via Citrix Desktop Studio.\u00a0I forget the exact message but it was about lack of resources. I could see that in the create catalog process it was creating a snapshot and making a copy VM, powering it on and off successfully, and then it was failing. I kept an eye on my storage during this and saw that indeed it was exceeding the allocated space. I had thought it would do thin provisioning but in retrospect I realize XenServer never asked me about thick or thin when I added my iSCSI storage. Hmm.<\/p>\n
Well turns out that for iSCSI XenServer has only thick provisioning<\/a>. You get thin provisioning only if you are using the ext3 filesystem or NFS. Since iSCSI uses LVM, bummer!\u00a0<\/p>\n Here’s a forum post<\/a> on how to identify if your SR is thick or not.\u00a0<\/p>\n Regarding thin provisioning – it is only for locally attached storage (which can use ext3) or NFS. Block attached storage is thick<\/a>.<\/p>\n Before I realized all this I had spent some Googling on how to create a thin provisioned SR (Storage Repository). I felt that maybe it’s a GUI restriction and I can workaround by using the CLI. Turns out I was wrong. Here’s an article<\/a> that explains SRs in XenServer anyway. It’s a good read. Here’s an article<\/a> just on enabling thin provisioning for ext3 SRs via the CLI.\u00a0<\/p>\n While on the topic of storage, this is something I wanted to blog about earlier but never got around to. When using SMB\/ CIFS shares<\/a>, XenServer only supports NTLMv1. Here’s instructions on using NTLMv2<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Also, That seems to work, but I get a logon failure.\u00a0This is because I didn’t put the username in quotes.\u00a0<\/p>\n That works!<\/p>\n I have no idea what the three commands below except that they are to do with mounting an SMB\/ CIFS share on a XenServer permanently. I had noted these commands as part of my would be blog post, but it’s been a while now and I forget. Sometime when I get around to doing SMB3 or NTLMv2 with XenServer again I hope to refer to these again and better explain. I don’t want to spend too much time on XenServers now and get sidetracked …<\/p>\n After issue the above commands I think the shared folder is mounted only on one host in the pool. But right clicking on it and doing a repair will get it mounted on all hosts in the pool.<\/p>\n XenServer 7.0 and above support SMB for VM disk storage too<\/a>. Prior versions support SMB only for ISO storage.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Playing with XenServer in my testlab (basically as a VM in VMware Workstation hah!) I ran into trouble while\u00a0creating a Machine Catalog via Citrix Desktop Studio.\u00a0I forget the exact message but it was about lack of resources. I could see that in the create catalog process it was creating a snapshot and making a copy … Continue reading Notes to self on XenServer storage<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[657,183],"tags":[404,707,708,709,703],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3419"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3419\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}smbclient<\/code> is a good tool to test SMB connects from a XenServer. Example:<\/p>\n[root@xs7-02 \/]# smbclient -L \/\/10.10.1.12\/Files -U rockylabs\\rakhesh -m SMB3\r\nEnter rockylabsrakhesh's password:\r\nsession setup failed: NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE<\/pre>\n
[root@xs7-02 \/]# smbclient -L \/\/10.10.1.12\/Files -U 'rockylabs\\rakhesh' -m SMB3\r\nEnter rockylabs\\rakhesh's password:\r\nDomain=[ROCKYLABS] OS=[] Server=[]\r\n\r\n Sharename Type Comment\r\n --------- ---- -------\r\n ADMIN$ Disk Remote Admin\r\n C$ Disk Default share\r\n D$ Disk Default share\r\n Files Disk\r\n IPC$ IPC Remote IPC\r\n ISO_Store Disk<\/pre>\n
xe sr-create name-label=data02_ISO_Store type=ISO shared=true device-config:location=\/\/data02.rockylabs.zero\/Files device-config:username='rockylabs\\xssmb' device-config:password='Password1' device-config:options='-t cifs'\r\n\r\nxe-mount-iso-sr \/\/data02.rockylabs.zero\/Files -o username=xssmb,password=Password1,domain=rockylabs,vers=3\r\n\r\n# I don't think this command really works - not sure\r\nxe-mount-iso-sr \/\/data02.rockylabs.zero\/Files -o username=xssmb,password=Password1,domain=rockylabs,sec=ntlmv2<\/pre>\n