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@Biggen At the moment, xcp-ng center provides some better views and overviews not yet available in XO.. Hoping next major version fixes this

Sorry for spamming the thread.

I have two identical servers (srv01 and srv02) with AMD EPYC 7402P 24 Core CPUs. On srv02 I enabled the LLC as NUMA Node.

I've done some quick benchmarks with Sysbench on Ubuntu 20.10 with 12 assigned cores. Command line: sysbench cpu run --threads=12

It would seem that in this test the NUMA option is much faster, 194187 events vs 103769 events. Perhaps I am misunderstanding how sysbench works?

With 7-zip the gain is much less, but still meaningful. A little slower in single-threaded performance but quite a bit faster in multi-threaded mode.

Problem was a stale connection with the NFS server. A reboot of the NFS server fixed the issue.

@xcprocks said in Restoring a downed host ISNT easy:

So, we had a host go down (OS drive failure). No big deal right? According to instructions, just reinstall XCP on a new drive, jump over into XOA and do a metadata restore.

Well, not quite.

First during installation, you really really must not select any of the disks to create an SR as you could potentially wipe out an SR.

Second, you have to do the sr-probe and sr-introduce and pbd-create and pbd-plug to get the SRs back.

Third, you then have to use XOA to restore the metadata which according to the directions is pretty simple looking. According to: https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/metadata_backup.html#performing-a-restore

"To restore one, simply click the blue restore arrow, choose a backup date to restore, and click OK:"

But this isn't quite true. When we did it, the restore threw an error:

"message": "no such object d7b6f090-cd68-9dec-2e00-803fc90c3593",
"name": "XoError",

Panic mode sets in... It can't find the metadata? We try an earlier backup. Same error. We check the backup NFS share--no its there alright.

After a couple of hours scouring the internet and not finding anything, it dawns on us... The object XOA is looking for is the OLD server not a backup directory. It is looking for the server that died and no longer exists. The problem is, when you install the new server, it gets a new ID. But the restore program is looking for the ID of the dead server.

But how do you tell XOA, to copy the metadata over to the new server? It assumes that you want to restore it over an existing server. It does not provide a drop down list to pick where to deploy it.

In an act of desperation, we copied the backup directory to a new location and named it with the ID number of the newly recreated server. Now XOA could restore the metadata and we were able to recover the VMs in the SRs without issue.

This long story is really just a way to highlight the need for better host backup in three ways:

A) The first idea would be to create better instructions. It ain't nowhere as easy as the documentation says it is and it's easy to mess up the first step so bad that you can wipe out the contents of an SR. The documentation should spell this out.

B) The second idea is to add to the metadata backup something that reads the states of SR to PBD mappings and provides/saves a script to restore them. This would ease a lot of the difficulty in the actual restoring of a failed OS after a new OS can be installed.

C) The third idea is provide a dropdown during the restoration of the metadata that allows the user to target a particular machine for the restore operation instead of blindly assuming you want to restore it over a machine that is dead and gone.

I hope this helps out the next person trying to bring a host back from the dead, and I hope it also helps make XOA a better product.

Thanks for a good description of the restore process.

I was wary of the metadata-backup option. It sounds simple and good to have, but as you said it is in no way a comprehensive restore of a pool.

I'd like to add my own oppinion here. A full pool restore, including network, re-attaching SRs and everything else that is needed to quickly get back up and running. Also a restore pool backup should be available on the boot media. It could look for a NFS/CIFS mount or a USB disk with the backup files on. This would avoid things like issues with bonded networks not working.

Might a different solution be to use a USB network bridge instead of direct attached USB? Something like this https://www.seh-technology.com/products/usb-deviceserver/utnserver-pro.html (There are different options available)... We use my-utn-50a with hardware USB keys and it has shown to be very reliable over the years.

@dinhngtu Thank you. I think it is clear for me now.

The docs at https://xcp-ng.org/docs/guests.html#windows could be improved to cover all three options but also to be a little more concise to make it easier to read.

@McHenry

Looks like you want disaster recovery option. It creates a ready-to-use VM on a separate XCP-ng server. If your main server fails you can start the vm directly off the second server.

In any case, backups can be restored with XO to any server and storage available in XCP-ng.

@rtjdamen you could simply make two backup jobs, one for daily backups and one for monthly backups.

Since the nfs shares can be mounted on other hosts, I'd guess a fsid/clientid mismatch.

In the share, always specify fsid export option. If you do not use it, the nfs server tries to determine a suitable id from the underlying mounts. It may not always be reliable, for example after an upgrade or other changes. Now, if you combine this with a client that uses hard mount option and the fsid changes, it will not be possible to recover the mount as the client keeps asking for the old id.

Nfs3 uses rpcbind and nfs4 doesn't, though this shouldn't matter if your nfs server supports both protocols. With nfs4 you should not export the same directory twice. That is do not export the root directory /mnt/datavol if /mnt/datavol/dir1 and /mnt/datavol/dir2 are exported.

So to fix this, you can adjust your exports (fsid, nesting) and the nfs mount option (to soft) , reboot the nfs server and client and see if it works.

@andrewm4894 said in Netdata package is now available in XCP-ng:

Qq, what would be the best way for me to try spin up a sort of test or dev XCP-ng env for me to try things out on? Or is there sort of hardware involved such that this might not be so easy. In my mind I'm imagining spinning up a VM lol which probably shows my level of naivety

You can run XCP-ng inside a VM, as long as the hypervisor underneath exposes nested virtualisation. The actual installation of XCP-ng is very easy. Mostly click and run.

@olivierlambert looks nice, also with the improved docs

@olivierlambert hi. I'm also eager to see how the new v3 is progressing. From my company point of view, being able to compact VDIs using guest trim/unmap is very valuable as it minimises storage space usage and improves backup/restore speeds.

For now, a warning in XOA when changing the management IP would be nice. It could include an instruction on how to update the pool members after the IP of the master was changed.

Is it possible to use hostnames instead of IPs? It could make things easier?

@olivierlambert said in IP Address changed for a slave within a Pool, How do I reconfigure it?:

On a slave host, the database is in read only. If the slave lost the connection with the master, there's no way to make any change into the "local" slave XAPI database.

It makes sense. It would have been nice if pool members get the updated IP through XAPI before the actual change on the master happens.

@olivierlambert said in IP Address changed for a slave within a Pool, How do I reconfigure it?:

If you changed the master IP, the XAPI slave can't reach the master anymore, and so you can't make any modification via XAPI (since everything is going to the master, and then if needed to the slave).

On the slave, you might need to modify manually the master IP address in /etc/xensource/pool.conf. You should have:
slave:<OLD MASTER IP> and change it to slave:<NEW MASTER IP>

I had exactly this error an hour ago. I changed the management interface IP, but the member server could not re-establish contact. Looking in xensource logs I saw it was trying to connect using the old IP, but I thought this was stored in the xapi database and could not be updated...

Could you set up netconsole with your guest. This is a kernel feature that allows you to send the console to a netcat/nc client over the network. You add the configuraton to the kernel command line.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/netconsole.html

No problem Thanks yourself!

@julien-f said in Feat: Improvements to the VM statistics page::

Yes, I've noted this for XO6

Great. Thanks Now we just need a XO 6.0 release

Hi,
Are there any plans to release a new XOA based on kernel >=5.3 so that we can use the nconnect nfs mount option. The nconnect option increases NFS performance by utilising multiple connections to the same remote.

https://medium.com/@emilypotyraj/use-nconnect-to-effortlessly-increase-nfs-performance-4ceb46c64089

@Kajetan321 we use the digi anywhere USB 24 because we needed so many devices. But it works great. We also have a my-utn USB dongle server for year. Really good stuff both of them.

https://www.seh-technology.com/services/downloads/download-deviceserver/myutn-50.html

https://hub.digi.com/support/products/infrastructure-management/digi-anywhereusb-24-plus/