RE: 11-RELEASE and live migration

[Jay West]

My setup...

Hosts: Two Dell R310's, each one as follows: 32gb ram, L3480 cpu, 4 gigabit
nics, two 300gb disks (mirrored), where the local disk is used only to hold
xenserver 7.0 with all patches up through and including today. These
machines are 100% up to date on firmware, patches, bios, etc.

Network: Two Dell powerconnect 6224's, stacked via dual round-robin CX4
cables. There's an untagged management vlan, an untagged data vlan, and an
untagged ISCSI vlan - identical ports are members on each switch. On each
host, the two builtin nics (data) are connected one leg in each switch (same
vlan). The two addin ports (Intel Pro/1000) (iSCSI) on each host are also
connected one leg in each switch. The switches are 100% up to date on
firmware/OS. Client access to this is via a stack of Juniper EX2200's
trunked back to the 6224's.

Storage: OEM version of a Tyan 2U 12 bay SAS box, similar to Tyan
S8226WGM3NR but with 7 gigabit NICS builtin. 32gb ram, FreeNAS 9.10.1-U4,
and dual AMD C32's (12 cores total). One nic is used for ILO, another for
management, another is unused , and the remaining four gigabit ports are
connected two legs in each switch (same vlan, iscsi only, 9000mtu).
Multipath is configured and active.

The storage box is using mirrored vdev's with ZFS on top, 100% of which
present an iSCSI target so the box is doing nothing but iscsi (and an NFS
iso share for installing vm's). So in Xencenter... there is one storage
repository containing all the NAS space. Xencenter then creates the vdisks
inside that for each VM to use.

FreeBSD 10X doesn't seem to have this problem. FreeBSD11 definitely does,
and apparently I'm not the only one who can see it. I should also point out
that Windows VM's (both Server 2012 R2 and 7 pro - both 64bit) have no
problem migrating to another host and then back. And FreeBSD can definitely
migrate to another host - just not then back to the first (at least...
immediately. I haven't tried waiting an hour or so and then trying the
migration back).

I also cannot select the source host as the destination in Xencenter. The
host servers are completely identical in every respect. All vm's disk is via
iSCSI as above.

I also have a completely separate architecture that is identical to the
above, except much larger, using xenserver 6.5, HP DL1000's, and cisco 3750G
stacks. I have not yet tested freebsd11 on that installation; I assumed it
wouldn't be much help as it's older versions of all the code.

The smaller architecture above is not yet in production, so I can do testing
on it. The larger installation mentioned later above is production, and I
can't do much major testing there.

Hopefully some of this info helps!

J
-Original Message-
From: owner-freebsd-...@freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-...@freebsd.org]
On Behalf Of Hoyer-Reuther, Christian
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2016 4:40 AM
To: Roger Pau Monné ; h...@dhcp-3-221.uk.xensource.com
Cc: freebsd-xen@freebsd.org; owner-freebsd-...@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: 11-RELEASE and live migration

Hello,

I cannot select the source host as destination when I migrate from
XenCenter.

All 3 hosts use the same hardware. Disk backend for all VMs is iSCSI.

Regards,

Christian

> -Ursprüngliche Nachricht-
> Von: Roger Pau Monné [mailto:roger@citrix.com]
> Gesendet: Montag, 12. Dezember 2016 11:32
> An: Hoyer-Reuther, Christian; h...@dhcp-3-221.uk.xensource.com
> Cc: freebsd-xen@freebsd.org; owner-freebsd-...@freebsd.org
> Betreff: Re: 11-RELEASE and live migration
> 
> On Thu, Dec 08, 2016 at 10:33:37AM +0100, Hoyer-Reuther, Christian wrote:
> > I did some tests and I see the problem too.
> >
> > XenServer 6.5 SP1 with almost all patches (3 hosts in pool), FreeBSD 
> > 11.0-
> RELEASE-p2, xe-guest-utilities-6.2.0_2 installed via pkg.
> >
> > First migration from host 3 to host 1 is ok.
> >
> > Some seconds later I start a new migration from host 1 to host 2 and 
> > when
> migration finishes (as seen in XenCenter) then the VM switches to the 
> VGABios screen ("Plex86/Bochs VGABios (PCI) current-cvs 01 Sep 2016 ...
> cirrus-compatible VGA is detected"). The VM seem to hang and does not 
> respond. In XenCenter I see that all the CPU's of the VM go up to 100 
> percent.
> >
> > Then after 17 minutes the VGABios screen disappears and I see the 
> > console,
> the CPU usage as seen in XenCenter goes down. I logged in as root 
> before I started the first migration and root is still logged in. So 
> it was a hang and not a reboot.
> >
> > 20 minutes later I start a new migration from host 2 to host 3 and 
> > the
> problem occurs again.
> >
> > This problem does not exist with 10.3-RELEASE on the same hosts.
> 
> Hello,
> 
> So far I've only tested local migration (migration using the same host 
> as source and destination), and that seems to work fine (I've done +50 
> consecutive migrations with only 10s separation between them). Is 
> there a change that you could also try to reproduce this with 

RE: 11-RELEASE and live migration

[Jay West]

Rainer wrote...
--
We've also seen this (unexplainable reboots, I think they happen after
migrations).

But it never hangs. It seems to actually "reboot", as if somebody had
pressed CTRL-ALT-DEL or typed "reboot".
-

I should also point out... on the same pair of hosts, there are a few
windows server 2012 r2 and windows 7 pro VM's. None of them have problems
migrating back and forth. It's only the F11 ones that do.

First migration goes fine, and vm can be logged in to and excercised. But
then migrate it back... and it goes to the fake bios post screen (I
forget... cirrus bios or something).. and then just hangs without loading OS
so there is no message from the OS.

Strange... I have older versions of freebsd on an older version of
xenserver... and the above definitely is not a problem there.

Perhaps it's something amiss with my new setup, but the windows vm's migrate
fine

J



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RE: disk loss

[Jay West]

Egoitz wrote...
 I would recommend you using NFS instead of iSCSI. It’s far more better 
 to handle the connection to disk arrays (the FreeNAS in this 
 situation) through a mature and stable protocol like NFS and not 
 something manipulating blocks directly. I would advise you to rely the 
 responsibility of serving the SR to NFS.

To which Mark Felder replied:
You can't have redundant paths with NFS (in FreeBSD), though. I'm not so sure 
everyone would agree that NFS is mature and stable, either :-)

My personal experience with building a Xen+FreeBSD cluster concluded that NFS 
was far too slow and unreliable, and a properly configured iSCSI with multiple 
paths and proper alignment was extremely fast.
---
NFS mature  stable (?? Subjective), but more importantly - it's not the right 
choice for a SAN from a speed nor technology perspective.
Mark, along with probably most of the production infrastructure implementors - 
is (subjectively) correct :)

That all being said, I'd wager that other than specific use cases (ex. Shared 
content for a webserver farm, which on freebsd pretty much HAS to be NFS 
because FreeBSD as of yet does not support any cluster aware filesystems)... 
most people are using iSCSI for that type of common use case in a large 
environment. It'd behoove freebsd to see why there is an issue (where there is 
none with Windows or Linux Guests).

J



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RE: Terrible performance of XenServer 6.2 and FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE guest

[Jay West]

Freebsd shutdown -h has never worked right (what is right behavior is
subjective) on xenserver. If the guest utilities are installed, use
Xencenter to shutdown. If not, or, if you just prefer command line - you'll
find that shutdown -p will actually take the vm down correctly.

Also - the slow screen display inside xencenter console has also always been
an issue. I've never seen it work well. Not sure if this is a freebsd or xen
based (with freebsd, as other guest os's seem to get it right) issue. Would
love to see it fixed, but... we only use the xencenter console for freebsd
long enough to assign an IP and open up ssh ;)

Jay West, President
EZwind.net
11 The Pines Court, Suite B
Chesterfield, MO 63141
P: 314-781-1800
F: 314-558-9284
E: jw...@ezwind.net
W: www.ezwind.net


-Original Message-
From: owner-freebsd-...@freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-...@freebsd.org]
On Behalf Of Big Lebowski
Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2014 9:17 AM
To: freebsd-xen@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Terrible performance of XenServer 6.2 and FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE
guest

In addition to that, I've also noticed  that even with xe guest utilitiest
installed and started, neither halt nor shutdown -h now are working (they
seem to stop the guest OS, but the vm stays up for the hypervisor and needs
to be forced to shutdown/restart) and that the XenCenter console is not
refreshing properly (it requires some additional movement, like cursor keys
being used to refresh the screen).

Regards,
BL


On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 12:38 PM, Big Lebowski
spankthes...@gmail.comwrote:

 Hi all,

 I've just installed XenServer 6.2 along with all latest patches (SP1 
 and
 014 update) on a machine that was previously a bare metal FreeBSD 
 9.2-R installation, running fast and smooth.

 That machine is a Quad Core cpu with 32GB of RAM:

 processor : 0
 vendor_id : GenuineIntel
 cpu family : 6
 model : 58
 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz stepping : 9 cpu 
 MHz : 3400.086 cache size : 8192 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 1 core 
 id : 0 cpu cores : 1 apicid : 0 initial apicid : 0 fdiv_bug : no 
 hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes 
 cpuid level : 13 wp : yes flags : fpu de tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep 
 mtrr mca cmov pat clflush acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht nx constant_tsc 
 nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq vmx est ssse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 
 x2apic popcnt aes hypervisor ida arat tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept 
 vpid bogomips : 6835.86 clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address 
 sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management:

 and 2x 3TB SATA disks connected in software raid 1 (mdraid).

 After performing the updates on XenServer, I've installed first vm, 
 FreeBSD 10.0-R amd64:

 FreeBSD poudriere 10.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE #0 r260789: Thu Jan 16
 22:34:59 UTC 2014 r...@snap.freebsd.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
  amd64

 with 8 vcpu's, 8GB of RAM, and two vdisks, 8GB for /, and 100GB for 
 /poudriere (both mounted with noatime). After playing a while with the 
 vm (installing pkg, peforming portsnap fetch extract, installing 
 poudriere) I've noticed extremely poor performance:

 * portsnap extract can take over 20 minutes to dump the ports tree
 * svnlite checkout of head/base takes ages and while it is happening, 
 the vm is almost unusable: it freezes periodicaly so even typing in 
 console is impossible, ls -la /usr/src takes few seconds to execute, 
 the svnlite process displays checked files in chunks (it runs for a 
 while, freezes, runs for a while again, and so on)

 I wonder if there's anything I am missing in running FreeBSD as 
 XenServer guest? Linux vms on the same XenServer host are running 
 faster by orders of magnitude, and fbsd is not just slower, its unusable.

 I'd appreciate any help!

 Regards,
 BL.

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Poor network performance

[Jay West]

Xenserver 6.2, Freebsd 10-Release

We are noticing poor network performance. It is a stock install of 10-R with
no special tuning, no custom kernel built, no extra modules loaded, and the
xentools 4.1.3 installed.

Question - I have heard that one should always use -tso, but all those
discussions seem to be pf related. We do not have pf enabled at all so I
have not gone that route. Should we be putting -tso in the vm's rc.conf
ifconfig regardless?

Jay West, President
EZwind.net
11 The Pines Court, Suite B
Chesterfield, MO 63141
P: 314-781-1800
F: 314-558-9284
E: jw...@ezwind.net
W: www.ezwind.net




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RE: FreeBSD 10.0-R as Xen 'guest' - clarification?

[Jay West]

I guess I could try it and see but is it also true that we no longer
have to do the dance with removing the cd/dvd drive and fixing fstab for ad0
device naming convention?
And what about the NO_ADAPTIVE _* kernel options - not needed?

Jay West, President
EZwind.net
11 The Pines Court, Suite B
Chesterfield, MO 63141
P: 314-781-1800
F: 314-558-9284
E: jw...@ezwind.net
W: www.ezwind.net

-Original Message-
From: owner-freebsd-...@freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-...@freebsd.org]
On Behalf Of Mark Felder
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2014 1:24 PM
To: freebsd-xen@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 10.0-R as Xen 'guest' - clarification?



On Wed, Jan 29, 2014, at 9:28, Karl Pielorz wrote:
 
 And for 'xen tools' - we're still correct to install the port of 
 'sysutils/xe-guest-utilities' - correct?
 

Yes, I have a few VMs deployed working marvellously with 10.0-RELEASE and
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tcp offloading

[Jay West]

Environment is Citrix Xenserver Advanced, with (mostly) freebsd 9.1 64bit
HVM with PV drivers.

 

I've heard much mention around the net that in pretty much all cases, TCP
offloading should be disabled inside the VM. I have also seen other posts
that TCP offloading should be disabled on the Dom0.

 

So my question is; for best performance should TCP offloading be disabled in
the VM, or the Xenserver (dom0), or should it be disabled in BOTH?

 

Anyone have a definitive answer?

 

Jay West

EZwind.net

PO Box 460474

Saint Louis, MO 63146

Voice: (314) 262-4143 ext 1000

Toll Free: (866) 343-2589

Fax: (314) 558-9284

 mailto:jw...@opensourceassociates.com jw...@ezwind.net

 



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misc. questions

[Jay West]

1)One or two of our freebsd 9.1 HVM (with PVM drivers) under
Xenserver 6.1 advanced are fairly frequently generating this message on the
console: xn_txeof: WARNING: response is -1! Any ideas what this may be and
what should be done? It does seem to only occur on the machines that have
higher network load than the others.

 

2)We did a pilot project of about 8 VM's (the above mentioned
environment) and all went well. Now that we've moved it into production with
many more VM's, I'm wondering about recommended tuning. I seem to recall
from watching this list that there are a few sysctl's and the like that are
highly recommended, I think they had to do with network settings and turning
off offloading or somesuch. Does anyone have a quick  dirty list of
here's the first things you should always change with regards to FreeBSD
HVM (pvm drivers) under XenServer?

 

3)When migrating bare-metal non-VM FreeBSD machines (primarily
webservers and mailservers) to the above Xenserver environment, we have
always just created VM's from an ISO, installed apache, sendmail, etc. and
then migrated the websites, mailboxes, etc. manually across the wire from
the non-VM machines to the replacement VM's. Xenconvert does not seem to
support FreeBSD/gpart/ufs. Does anyone know of a way (software or procedure)
to take a bare-metal FreeBSD 9.1 install and turn it into a VDI or OVF/OVA
that can be imported to Xenserver? 

 

Thanks in advance for any tips, pointers, or insight!

 

 

Jay West

EZwind.net

PO Box 460474

Saint Louis, MO 63146

Voice: (314) 262-4143 ext 1000

Toll Free: (866) 343-2589

Fax: (314) 558-9284

 mailto:jw...@opensourceassociates.com jw...@ezwind.net

 



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RE: 9.1R?

[Jay West]

Mark wrote
You're not running XCP or XenServer. That's why you don't have those bugs.

Exactly. I can confirm the bugs previously mentioned definitely exist and are 
100% reproduceable.


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9.1R?

[Jay West]

As one of the many that have been delaying a major production rollout in
anticipation of the release of 9.1, I've been anxiously awaiting. No
announcement yet, but I did notice ftp.freebsd.org has an amd64 9.1-Release
iso for download. Given the date of the file as 12/4 I'm a little hesitant
to just jump on it and start building VM's.. Anyone else notice/use this
yet?

 

All our FreeBSD use is now under Xenserver 6.1. I was curious, given the
port of xe-guest-utilities that allows online migrations and such. after
installing those tools (thus PVM/64), should we be changing our mount points
to refer to the xen hd device (xbdX) or continue to use adX inside the VM
for filesystem mounts (kinda like we need to change the network device {ex.
bgeX} to xnX)? Just looking for a sanity check J

 

Jay West

EZwind.net

PO Box 460474

Saint Louis, MO 63146

Voice: (314) 262-4143 ext 1000

Toll Free: (866) 343-2589

Fax: (314) 558-9284

 mailto:jw...@opensourceassociates.com jw...@ezwind.net

 



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RE: Citrix Xenserver and FreeBSD migration/suspend scripts

[Jay West]

Feedback Mark you absolutely ROCK.

Jay West
EZwind.net
PO Box 460474
Saint Louis, MO 63146
Voice: (314) 262-4143 ext 1000
Toll Free: (866) 343-2589
Fax: (314) 558-9284
jw...@ezwind.net


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-Original Message-
From: owner-freebsd-...@freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-...@freebsd.org] On 
Behalf Of Mark Felder
Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2012 3:02 PM
To: freebsd-xen@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Citrix Xenserver and FreeBSD migration/suspend scripts

Hi guys, I've done some recent updates:

We're down to a resonable amount of scripts now:

%%LOCALBASE%%/etc/rc.d/xe-daemon
%%LOCALBASE%%/sbin/xe-daemon
%%LOCALBASE%%/sbin/xe-update-guest-attrs
%%LOCALBASE%%/sbin/xe_wrapper


Other changes:

- Cleaner memory reporting
- IPs for your network interfaces are reported correctly
- New version and build to match what the Linux tools report on XenServer
6.0.2 which should make the out of date errors go away


Feel free to leave some more feedback. I expect this will be joining the 
xen-tools port very soon now.
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