Change management network interface?

Station-Already

Hey all -

First I thought I'd like to say that I'm loving Xen Orchestra, thanks for making such a wonderful product that competes so strongly with VCenter.

Secondly: My pool host (only one, at the moment) is connected to our network just fine, but I need to change the type of port that it's connected to from a basic "access" port (that lets it talk to just ONE VLAN) to a trunk port (that lets it communicate to many). In order to do this without breaking my connectivity to the host (and Xen Orchestra), I need to set the "management" network to the PIF which will tag the packets with the appropriate VLAN / subnet.

I don't see any obvious way to do this in Xen Orchestra... am I missing something? Do I need to do something via the xe command?

olivierlambert

Pinging @fohdeesha

fohdeesha

@station-already Hi! This can be done in XOA, but it requires deleting the existing management interface, then creating a new one on the new PIF you've created (a vlan 10 on eth0 PIF for example). You say you can't lose access to the host however, so that is probably not an option. XCP-ng center, the windows client, has a bit of a workaround, it has a dropdown box that will allow you to change the PIF of an existing management interface/IP address to a new interface. In XCP-ng center just go to the Networking tab of the host, then hit configure at the bottom beneath the management interfaces section.

It will have a new pop up window with a dropdown for where you want the existing management interface to exist. Assuming you've already created the vlan network you want in xcp-ng, it should show up in this list. just choose it and hit ok:

olivierlambert

We should probably have the same thing in XO. However, I wonder how XCP-ng Center is doing all that, maybe with on XAPI call?

fohdeesha

@olivierlambert indeed, I believe it's just:

xe host-management-reconfigure pif-uuid=<PIF_UUID>

with the PIF_UUID being the UUID of the new PIF interface (bond, vlan, etc) you would like to move the existing management interface to

EDIT: hmm nope that's not it this xe command does not migrate the existing IP settings, it can only be ran against a PIF that already has an IP set. So I'm still curious what xencenter is doing to do all of this in one go

Station-Already

@fohdeesha This is absolutely fantastic. Thank you.

Station-Already

@fohdeesha Okay, so I had a bit of an adventure there (oddly, setting my management interface to the VLAN interface did not seem to work - even after doing an xe pif-reconfigure-ip command to make sure I was set to the correct IP and all that jazz - but that may have been because I set the trunk port to natively carry that VLAN's traffic without tagging).

Still, now XOA seems to be unable to connect. I can GET to my XOA instance, but I cannot see my list of VMs or networks or anything - my XOA seems to be unable to connect to my host. It says, "Some XenServers have been registered but are not connected" and when I go in there, I SEE my host, but I cannot connect to it. There's a scary red triangle and it says "connect EHOSTUNREACH 192.168.1.100:443".

I almost wonder if XOA is sending tagged packets and the host isn't...

EDIT: wellp, nope. I have SSH access to the host, and I just checked to see if maybe I had the XOA VM hooked up to one of the VLAN-ish interfaces and the host hooked to the actual main interface... they are both connected to the same interface, yet they absolutely cannot ping each other. They're on the same subnet! I'm annoyed. More digging.

EDIT AGAIN: HMMM I just disabled switchport trunk native vlan x on the switch and replies started coming right back in once I had switched the node to the VLAN X PIF. I have rebooten it - presumably I need to put XOA on that PIF now! Will report back.

EDIT AGAIN AGAIN: omg you guys use the google blobs as emoji here... my whole heart

EDIT FINAL: yep, okay, I found some issues with my config but for some reason my XCP-ng host and Xen Orchestra simply refuse to talk to eachother. I know I'm getting the right IP address, and I know I'm getting the right username and password - and yet, I still get that "connect EHOSTUNREACH 192.168.1.100:443" error. I HAVE figured out how to get things to properly route while on VLAN PIFs now (static routes! hooray!) but the XCP-ng host and Xen Orchestra are both on the same network and everything, and I cannot get Xen Orchestra to connect to the XCP-ng host.

EDIT FOR REALSIES FINAL: ...

...and then I rebooted XOA and everything fixed itself. Neat.

fohdeesha

@station-already hehe glad you got it figured out Indeed, management interface changes are pretty "violent" in terms of how much they change and interrupt, so a reboot helps quite often - same for changing the virtual adapter/PIF assigned to a VM - alway a good idea to reboot the VM