How do you manage multiple VMs outside of Xen Orchestra?
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The major drawback of Xen Orchestra is that if the server goes down, all of its VMs are gone too. No clean list of VMs in 'clean' state. Yes, there are backups—lots of them—and replications, but it understandig what's wrong is difficult. If you have hundreds of VMs, how do you track the state of individual VMs: which server each one runs on, which servers have replications, and where backups are stored?
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Hi,
I'm not sure to understand your question. If XO is gone, your VMs will continue to run, XO is like the "remote" of your TV, if you lose it, your TV won't break.
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@olivierlambert I mean if the server goes down, all VMs that were running on that server disappear from XO. Yes, I can create manual entries to monitor them in Zabbix and I do, but for hundreds of VMs, that's a lot of manual work.
Basically, I'd like to see something like a table of VMs showing their status, availability of their replications on other servers, number of backups, etc.
Currently, I'm really falling behind with my Zabbix setup because there's too much manual work involved in tracking all VM IP addresses and other details (especially if some VMs are not easily accessible by IP!). There are no automated tools to properly view the status of each VM - not just up/down status, but comprehensive XO data.
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Suppose I have a server with VMs replicated to 3 other different servers (weaker than the main one). Then the main server goes down. I need to assess quickly which copies I should start first. How do I quickly check all the VMs that went down? Some are not important, some are... Without a central list of VMs with their status, it's much trickier.
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Ok I think I understand what you need. It's displaying disappeared objects (eg all VMs or hosts from a disconnected XAPI). It will be done in XO 6, it's already planned.
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@olivierlambert Cool. Waiting for that feature
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Can you simply change the filter to "none" in the vm view to see those that are stopped (red icon)?
This only works if the master host is still running, if that host crashes, you have more work ahead of you.
I also suggest having an XO from sources running somewhere else, like a laptop (VM or hardware), or an old low power server, in a VM on another pool, etc. That way if the host running XOA or XO-CE fails, or the VM just crashes, you will have a backup.
Also keep you XO config backed up since it is pretty quick to deploy a new XO and blast the config onto it.
In version 8.3 you could also log into the XO-Lite and see the VMs that are running and those that are not.
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@Greg_E "if that host crashes" -- that's the problem. When the host is gone, VMs are gone. Not colored in red 'we are gone', there are none of them.
There is no problem running XO itself on other host.
The question is not how to keep VMs backed -- they are.
But right now, when host X is gone and its VMs are replicated to hosts Y and Z, how can i quickly see that VMs A,B,C and D are gone and E, F, G, etc are up? No way, because X is gone and its VMs gone too.
I have to monitor them via Zabbix to see if they are gone.
But syncing hundreds of VMs with Zabbix is tiresome, it's a lot of manual work.
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And that's the reason why we planned to keep displaying "out of sync objects" in XO 6
