Welcome to the new Xen.org weekly newsletter with a variety of information to keep you updated on all things Xen. This newsletter is an upgrade from my previous weekly communications and is meant to offer a broader scope of Xen.org activities. Please feel free to contact me with suggestions for the newsletter.

Xen News

• Xen.org Selected for Google Summer of Code 2010 - http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/03/19/xen-org-in-google-summer-of-code-2010/
• Xen.org wins award from 10th annual Linux New Media Awards : Best Open Source Solution for Cloud Computing
• Xen.org Mascot Contest – I have hired an artist to begin creating sample images for the three finalists; stay tuned.

Xen Events

• Xen Summit North America at AMD April 28-29, 2010
  • Speaker Topics Submission – Submit at http://xensummit.org
  • Local Hotels – http://www.xen.org/files/xensummit_amd10/HotelListing.pdf
  • Attendee Registration for $235 – http://www.regonline.com/xen_summit_amd
• Xen Directions 2010
  • South America – August 31 – September 1 in Sao Paulo, Brazil
  • North America – August 9 in Boston, MA as part of LinuxCon
• Citrix Synergy May 11 – 13 in San Francisco, CA – Looking for booth volunteers
• SouthEast LinuxFest 2010 June 12-13, 2010 in Spartanburg, SC – Looking for booth volunteers
• Bring Xen.org to an event near year – Do you know of an event near you that would be served by having a Xen.org booth? If so, I have a proposal for working together to support that event; http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/01/28/bring-xen-org-to-your-local-event/

Xen Products

• Xen 4.0 Release Candidate 6 - http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-unstable.hg tagged ‘4.0.0-rc6′
• Python based migration utility for migrating your xend virtual machines to XCP – http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/03/12/python-migration-utility-for-xend-virtual-machines-to-xcp/
• XCP Repositories on xen-unstable - http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/03/12/xen-cloud-platform-xcp-repositories-available-on-xen-unstable/
• XCP Project Suggestions Site – http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XAPI_project_suggestions
• Xen Community Overview in Korean (thanks to Heechul Kim) - http://www.xen.org/files/Marketing/XenCommunityOverview_ko.pdf

Xen Members in Action

• Kudos to Marco Sinhoreli for his efforts in creating Xen Directions South America in late August 2010
• Xen.org Mailing Lists SuperStars – Brandon Lamb, David Scott, Boris Derzhavets, Jan Beulich, and Ritu Kaur
• Welcome Mr. X for joining the xen-users mailing list; Xen.org is now officially cool

Xen Weekly Stats

• xen-users had 58 questions and 272 responses on those questions for the week – great community activity
• Xen.org Activity – 17,720 visitors for week, 54.66% use Firefox/ Chrome at 13.65%

The complete newsletter with all data including the summary of all xen-users/xen-devel/xen-api mailing lists can be found at http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenUpdate20100319.

I am pleased to announce that Xen.org has been accepted as a mentor organization into Google Summer of Code 2010. You can get all the information on Google Summer of Code at http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/program/home/google/gsoc2010. Please contact me if you have any questions.

Xen.org is expanding our events in 2010 with two new events:

• Xen Directions South America – In conjunction with a soon to be announced Linux Foundation event in Sao Paulo, Brazil on August 31 – September 1.
• Xen Directions North America – In conjunction with LinuxCon 2010 in Boston, MA we will hold a day long event on August 9 with the full LinuxCon event on the 10-12th.

I will be adding more information on these two events on the Xen.org events page. Please remember that Xen Directions are more marketing focused than our developer oriented Xen Summits. If you are interested in participating as a speaker at either of these events please contact me.

Finally, thanks to Marco Sinhoreli in Brazil for his outstanding efforts in helping to  create our first Xen.org event in South America.

I have activated the Xen Summit at AMD event registration site at http://www.regonline.com/xen_summit_amd for next month’s Xen Summit in Sunnyvale, CA from April 28-29, 2010. The event cost is $235 which includes food and snacks on both days during the sessions, an evening at Dave and Buster’s on the 28th, a Xen giveaway, and a small contribution toward the registration costs for 10 college students. Speakers already committed include Ian Pratt (Xen.org Community Update), Keir Fraser (Xen Status on 4.0.0+), AMD Executive, Dave Scott (XCP), George Dunlap (Scheduler), and others to be named later. A list of nearby hotels is available at http://www.xen.org/files/xensummit_amd10/HotelListing.pdf.   If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Finally, we are still taking speaker/topic submissions at http://xensummit.org.

I look forward to seeing you at AMD next month in California.

Thanks to Heechul Kim for translating the Xen.org Community Overview into Korean. The document is here.

A new python based migration utility for migrating your xend virtual machines to XCP  is now available at:

http://www.xen.org/products/cloud_projects.html

It can generate XVAs from your xend based HVM and paravirtualised virtual machines.
It can also steam your VM directly to a XenServer/XCP host over HTTP or HTTPS.

Please read the README for pointers and guidelines on how to prepare your VMs for migration to XCP. Most PV based virtual machines will need some preparation work.

From Vincent Hanquez on xen-devel:

I’m please to announce the availability of repositories [1,2] for the xen cloud platform tools [3] on xen-unstable.

The goal of these repositories is to make compilation of the XCP platform toolstack:

• “easier” than in the current form.
• available with bleeding edge xen (and also libxenlight).
• integrate with any distributions (potentially creating debian/redhat/etc packages)

Dependencies you need to have:

• ocaml compilers and tools (debian = ocaml, camlp4, camlp4-extra, ocaml-nox)
• ocaml package type-conv (debian = libtype-conv-camlp4-dev)
• ocaml package dbus only for XCI (debian = libdbus-ocaml-dev)
• omake (debian = omake)
• xen-unstable

Compilation

• you need to clone [1] and inside the repository “git checkout unstable”
• ./configure
• make all
• make allxen
• make install && make installxen

• you need to clone [2] and inside the repository “git checkout unstable”
• make

Usability

At the moment the usability straight out of the repository is pretty low, as the XCP toolstack requires lots of various configurations and setting that are not joined. it is recommended to copy the setup of a properly configured XCP installation for getting started, until all the requirements are relaxed/made more generic/etc..

Please note that this is not as tested as the official XCP platform, so you should be careful when using those repositories, and they should be considered for development only. For stable installation please refer to [3]

Libxenlight integration

The goal is to integrate libxenlight into the XCP and XCI. until this works is fully done and stable, the xl work will stays separated from this work, nonetheless if you’re felling lucky or want to help, you can checkout the “unstable-xl” branch.

You can also find in [4] the equivalent effort related to the XCI project (branch unstable and unstable-xl)

[1] git://xenbits.xen.org/people/vhanquez/xcp-libs-unstable
[2] git://xenbits.xen.org/people/vhanquez/xcp-unstable
[3] http://www.xen.org/products/cloudxen.html
[4] git://xenbits.xen.org/people/vhanquez/xci-unstable

From Dave Scott:

I’ve collected together a bunch of XCP-related project suggestions and stuck them on the xen wiki:

http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XAPI_project_suggestions

The main idea is that new people who want to work on XCP can use this list for inspiration… each idea has a rough guesstimate of size/ knowledge required/ impact and an initial first contact (who either suggested the idea originally or who is willing to help someone work on it)

I think a good next step would be to expand the list

• to include projects related to the items on the XCP roadmap; and
• to describe prototypes which are actively being worked on.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome!

From Keir on Tuesday (sorry about delay, I was on vacation)…

Folks,

‘4.0.0-rc6′ is now tagged at http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-unstable.hg

Pretty close now. Please test!

Hannover, March 5, 2010 – Xen, Intel, AdBlock, Google Android, OpenStreetMap, and Linux kernel programmers were winners of the 10th annual Linux New Media Awards, presented last evening at the CeBIT 2010 conference in Hannover, Germany. A jury of approximately 300 experts from the open source community nominated the candidates for the prestigious award. An award panel consisting of members of the open source community, authors, journalists, agencies, and industry representatives selected the winners. Among the panel members were the prominent kernel hacker Alan Cox, Linux International director Jon ‘maddog’ Hall, Linux author Michael Kofler, open source veteran Bruce Perens, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, former openSUSE community manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, and Joe Casad, editor in chief of Linux Pro Magazine and Linux Magazine (international English edition).

The acting editor in chief of the German Linux Magazin, Markus Feilner, and the magazine’s publisher, Brian Osborn, moderated in English and German. They proceeded to honor the winners at the Open Source Forum in Hall 2 at CeBIT 2010, presenting awards in six categories:

Best Open Source Solution for Cloud Computing: Xen
Kai Dupke, senior product manager at Novell responsible for Linux, presented the award to the founder of the Xen project, Keir Fraser. Xen enables running multiple virtual machines on a single host. Xen began at Cambridge University and is being further developed primarily by Citrix.

Most Linux/Open Source-Friendly Hardware Vendor: Intel
For the second year the award for Most Linux/Open Source-friendly Hardware Vendor went to Intel, which is not only actively involved in Linux kernel development, but also intervenes in favor of open standards. Rico Barth, chairman of the LIVE Linux association in Germany and managing directory of C.a.p.e IT GmbH, handed the award to Wolfgang Rosenberg, business development manager of EMEA at the Intel Software and Services Group.

Best Open Source Firefox Extension: AdBlock
Winner in this newly established category was the AdBlock extension, created by Wladimir Palant. Presenting the honor to Palant, who made a special trip from the Netherlands to accept the award, was Mozilla director of special programs Chris Hofmann.

Best Open Source Contribution to Mobile Devices: Google Android
The software platform for smartphones, mobile phones, and netbooks was honored for its breakthrough with Android version 2.0 over the past year. Knoppix founder Klaus Knopper handed the award to Ines Wesner, who accepted on behalf of Google Android developers.

Most Innovative Open Source Project: OpenStreetMap
Linux Magazin’s Markus Feilner didn’t deny himself the honor of conferring the Most Innovative Open Source Project award on a project that he has been following with some interest over the years. OpenStreetMap is a wiki project that generates a free world map that can be embedded without licensing fees in print, webpages, and applications such as navigation software. Sven Anders, a project and community member since day one, accepted the award.

Exceptional Contribution to Open Source/Linux/Free Software: Linux Kernel Programmers
The highpoint of the award ceremony was the award presented by Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, to the Linux kernel programmers. Representing the developer community and receiving the award was Hans-Joachim Picht, who has been working on furthering Linux platform development at the IBM Linux Technology Center in Boeblingen, Germany since 2006.

All award speeches and ceremonies were streamed live over the Internet from Techcast GmbH, and the live streaming video archives will be available soon on the Linux Magazin (German) and Linux Pro Magazine sites.

About Linux New Media AG
Linux New Media AG, founded in 1999, is currently the largest worldwide content provider for Linux and open source. The publishing house provides more than 30 print and online publications and has offices in five countries. In addition to Linux Pro Magazine, Linux Magazine, and Ubuntu User, Linux New Media AG produces German titles such as Linux Magazin, Linux Technical Review, LinuxUser, Ubuntu User, and EasyLinux, as well as independent editions in Spain, Poland, and Brazil. Linux New Media AG organizes events and conferences such as “CeBIT Open Source” and the “LinuxPark” series in Brazil.

Complete article available at http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Linux-New-Media-Awards-2010-Presented-at-CeBIT.

Welcome to the new Xen.org weekly newsletter with a variety of information to keep you updated on all things Xen. This newsletter is an upgrade from my previous weekly communications and is meant to offer a broader scope of Xen.org activities. Please feel free to contact me with suggestions for the newsletter.

There will be no newsletter next week as I will be sailing the Caribbean looking for treasure! The newsletter will return on Friday March 19 (unless I find buried treasure!).

Xen News

• Oracle Releases Virtual Box 3.14
• ConVirt 2.0 Announced
• Xen Hypervisor Monitoring with Zenoss Announced
• Xen.org Mascot Contest – Three finalists announced
  • Entry #5 – Zen Penguin from Dana Rawding
  • Entry #1 – Bonsai Tree form Joe Shon
  • Entry #10 – Sitting Panda Chewing Bamboo from Valentin Höbel

Xen Events

• Xen Summit North America at AMD April 28-29, 2010
  • Speaker Topics Submission – Submit at http://xensummit.org
  • Local Hotels – http://www.xen.org/files/xensummit_amd10/HotelListing.pdf
• Citrix Synergy May 11 – 13 in San Francisco, CA – Looking for booth volunteers
• SouthEast LinuxFest 2010 June 12-13, 2010 in Spartanburg, SC – Looking for booth volunteers
• Bring Xen.org to an event near year – Do you know of an event near you that would be served by having a Xen.org booth? If so, I have a proposal for working together to support that event; http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/01/28/bring-xen-org-to-your-local-event/

Xen Products

• Xen 4.0 Release Candidate 5 Available for Testing – http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-unstable.hg TAG = 4.0.0-rc5
• Xen 3.4 Release Candidate 3 Available for Testing – http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-3.4-testing.hg (tag 3.4.3-rc3)
• XCP Tutorial – Building a HVM Guest from Command Line Interface – Memory Issues with new VMs – Installing a VM Operating System from CD

Xen Members in Action

• Xen Community Member Highlight – Thiago Martins
• Boris Quiroz and Marco Sinhoreli have completed a new XCP article for Linux Magazine Brazil
• Xen.org Mailing Lists SuperStars – Jeremy Fitzhardinge, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk, Sheng Yang, James Pifer , Pasi Kärkkäinen, and John Madden

Xen Weekly Stats

• Project Golden Ratio February Data Available

The complete newsletter with all data including the summary of all xen-users/xen-devel/xen-api mailing lists can be found at http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenUpdate20100305.

From virtualization.info:

Oracle just released its first updated for VirtualBox after the acquisition of Sun.

The list of bugs corrected in version 3.1.4 is long but there are no new features .

An interesting thing is that the company decided to change the default behavior of the engine: now VirtualBox tries to leverage hardware virtualization acceleration by default, and this includes both VPDI and nested paging, provided by Intel VT-x and AMD-V RVI enhancements.

Nice blog posting from Open Source Zenoss at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SocializedSoftware/~3/tSQHqVWdS9s/.

This week I am very excited because we released Zenoss Core 2.5.2 with a cool new feature,  Xen hypervisor monitoring.
I am very happy to see Zenoss put this out as open source software, because it’s the beginning of what could be a great piece of software. Now that this is out there for anyone to use I expect to get lots of feedback to extend and improve it.
This extension to Zenoss Core discovers guests on Xen para-virtualized hosts and provides monitoring of performance and availability via SSH. While the Xen hosts run on physical servers, the virtual guests are listed per host and linked back to any discovered instances on the network. Admins can quickly find the associated hosts and guests and monitor their Xen virtual infrastructure along side their entire physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT environment through a single interface.
I really think this is the beginning of a lot of virtualization and cloud monitoring capabilities from Zenoss Core. In recent weeks we got a couple neat extensions for virtualization and cloud monitoring including Amazon Web Services,  Google App Engine, libvirt (a virtualization library favored by Red Hat) and Ganglia integration.

As the final part of this XCP tutorial, I wanted to add one more item that I discovered when booting up my HVM guest from a CD image. After complete all the memory and VM setup issues I got the following response to starting my new VM:

xe vm-start  uuid=f0ddc908-79a9-ea0f-7a22-17c8c4bd983c

The bootloader returned an error  vm: f0ddc908-79a9-ea0f-7a22-17c8c4bd983c (oracle_vm)
msg: Error from bootloader: Failed to parse the output of bootloader:   ()

In this case, my VM tried to obtain its information from the CD but was not finding it. I ran the following command to profile my entire VM image,

xe vm-param-list  uuid=f0ddc908-79a9-ea0f-7a22-17c8c4bd983c | grep HVM
HVM-boot-policy ( RW):
HVM-boot-params (MRW):
HVM-shadow-multiplier ( RW): 1.000
last-boot-record ( RO): ‘(’struct’ (‘uuid’ ‘f0ddc908-79a9-ea0f-7a22-17c8c4bd983c’) (‘allowed_operations’ (‘array’)) (‘current_operations’ (’struct’ (‘OpaqueRef:4f53e4c6-55dd-0b9a-b883-544943782288′ ’start’))) (‘power_state’ ‘Halted’) (‘name_label’ ‘oracle_vm’) (‘name_description’ ‘Installed via xe CLI’) (‘user_version’ ‘1′) (‘is_a_template’ (‘boolean’ ‘0′)) (’suspend_VDI’ ‘OpaqueRef:NULL’) (‘resident_on’ ‘OpaqueRef:NULL’) (‘affinity’ ‘OpaqueRef:NULL’) (‘memory_overhead’ ‘1048576′) (‘memory_target’ ‘512000000′) (‘memory_static_max’ ‘512000000′) (‘memory_dynamic_max’ ‘512000000′) (‘memory_dynamic_min’ ‘512000000′) (‘memory_static_min’ ‘512000000′) (‘VCPUs_params’ (’struct’)) (‘VCPUs_max’ ‘1′) (‘VCPUs_at_startup’ ‘1′) (‘actions_after_shutdown’ ‘destroy’) (‘actions_after_reboot’ ‘restart’) (‘actions_after_crash’ ‘restart’) (‘consoles’ (‘array’)) (‘VIFs’ (‘array’)) (‘VBDs’ (‘array’ ‘OpaqueRef:b6970f61-abdf-9ccb-2d98-94c01b571a3e’ ‘OpaqueRef:730588ba-f6f0-089e-ad86-e0930e3bcfd6′)) (‘crash_dumps’ (‘array’)) (‘VTPMs’ (‘array’)) (‘PV_bootloader’ ‘eliloader’) (‘PV_kernel’ ”) (‘PV_ramdisk’ ”) (‘PV_args’ ‘graphical utf8′) (‘PV_bootloader_args’ ”) (‘PV_legacy_args’ ”) (‘HVM_boot_policy’ ”) (‘HVM_boot_params’ (’struct’)) (‘HVM_shadow_multiplier’ (‘double’ ‘1′)) (‘platform’ (’struct’ (‘nx’ ‘false’) (‘acpi’ ‘true’) (‘apic’ ‘true’) (‘pae’ ‘true’) (‘viridian’ ‘true’))) (‘PCI_bus’ ”) (‘other_config’ (’struct’ (‘install-respository’ ‘cdrom’) (‘mac_seed’ ‘7328478f-c1e6-22d3-a856-c589537451f5′) (‘linux_template’ ‘true’) (‘machine-address-size’ ‘36′) (‘install-methods’ ‘cdrom,nfs,http,ftp’) (‘rhel5′ ‘true’) (‘install-distro’ ‘rhlike’))) (‘domid’ ‘-1′) (‘domarch’ ”) (‘last_boot_CPU_flags’ (’struct’)) (‘is_control_domain’ (‘boolean’ ‘0′)) (‘metrics’ ‘OpaqueRef:36a9d247-0c51-6cae-34ae-5db9bcae5108′) (‘guest_metrics’ ‘OpaqueRef:NULL’) (‘last_booted_record’ ”) (‘recommendations’ ‘<restrictions><restriction field=\”memory-static-max\” max=\”17179869184\” /><restriction field=\”vcpus-max\” max=\”8\” /><restriction property=\”number-of-vbds\” max=\”7\” /><restriction property=\”number-of-vifs\” max=\”7\” /></restrictions>’) (‘xenstore_data’ (’struct’)) (‘ha_always_run’ (‘boolean’ ‘0′)) (‘ha_restart_priority’ ”) (‘is_a_snapshot’ (‘boolean’ ‘0′)) (’snapshot_of’ ‘OpaqueRef:NULL’) (’snapshots’ (‘array’)) (’snapshot_time’ (‘dateTime.iso8601′ ‘19700101T00:00:00Z’)) (‘transportable_snapshot_id’ ”) (‘blobs’ (’struct’)) (‘tags’ (‘array’)) (‘blocked_operations’ (’struct’)) (’snapshot_info’ (’struct’)) (’snapshot_metadata’ ”) (‘parent’ ‘OpaqueRef:9ebdd1c5-2026-8773-7a06-0c36e67be3f0′) (‘children’ (‘array’)) (‘bios_strings’ (’struct’)))’

In the data above, it was clear that my HVM boot-policy had no setting so I updated that field with the following command:

xe vm-param-set uuid=f0ddc908-79a9-ea0f-7a22-17c8c4bd983c HVM-boot-policy=BIOS\ order HVM-boot-params:order=”dc”

From there, I was able to start my VM and leverage OpenXenCenter to run through the OS installation.

Final thoughts, I would like to thank Dave Scott from Citrix and Alberto González Rodríguez  from OpenXenCenter for assisting me these past few days while I worked through the memory and CD issues. Hopefully, my experience and notes can be of use to someone else trying out XCP for the first time.

As a continuation on my previous XCP Tutorial, I wanted to share some experiences with memory problems that have been a hindrance in my successful installation of new VMs on XCP.

1) Too much memory is taken up in my local storage repository (SR) – with each attempt to create a new VM, memory is put aside on your machine, Virtual Disk Image (VDI), and if you don’t use the VM you will need to release that memory. I discovered that I had about 15 extra VDIs on my machine that was taking memory. Here is what I did:

a) Run xe sr-list type=lvm
RETURN:
uuid ( RO)                : 07ec20ab-5088-67b1-50fe-a46cc689bc98
name-label ( RW): Local storage
name-description ( RW):
host ( RO): xenserver-reiazupz
type ( RO): lvm
content-type ( RO): user
b) Run xe vdi-list sr-uuid=07ec20ab-5088-67b1-50fe-a46cc689bc98
RETURN: ** In my case I had 15 different uuid (RO) that were listed, I only present 1 example
uuid ( RO)                : f3ace49e-6afe-4d96-befb-3b86910ea4b0
name-label ( RW): 0
name-description ( RW): Created by template provisioner
sr-uuid ( RO): 07ec20ab-5088-67b1-50fe-a46cc689bc98
virtual-size ( RO): 8589934592
sharable ( RO): false
read-only ( RO): false

c) Run xe vdi-destroy uuid=xxx for each uuid (RO) that you wish to destroy

2) Not enough free memory to run the VM – each server only has so much available memory for each additional VM that you try and start. Here are some commands you can run to determine how much memory is available, how much memory your VM is requesting, and how you can adjust the VM memory request.

a) Determine Amount of Memory Available on Machine

Run xe host-compute-free-memory
RETURN: 664014848

In my example, I only had 664 MB of memory available for a new VM to run in

b) Determine Amount of Memory VM is requesting (use your VM uuid)

Run xe vm-param-list uuid=f0ddc908-79a9-ea0f-7a22-17c8c4bd983c | grep ” memory-”
RETURN:
memory-actual ( RO): 0
memory-target ( RO): 0
memory-overhead ( RO): 1048576
memory-static-max ( RW): 1073741824
memory-dynamic-max ( RW): 1073741824
memory-dynamic-min ( RW): 1073741824
memory-static-min ( RW): 536870912

In this example, my VM was requesting 1 GB of memory so I needed to adjust the VM memory sizes as I only had 664 MB available.  The following commands allow you to update the memory for your individual VM.

c) Update VM Memory Requirements

Run these four commands in the order listed below for specfic VM uuid and in this example for 512 MB:

xe vm-param-set uuid=fc84c8f0-3be0-8b05-95db-966b9460d3ac memory-static-min=512000000
xe vm-param-set uuid=fc84c8f0-3be0-8b05-95db-966b9460d3ac memory-dynamic-min=512000000
xe vm-param-set uuid=fc84c8f0-3be0-8b05-95db-966b9460d3ac memory-dynamic-max=512000000
xe vm-param-set uuid=fc84c8f0-3be0-8b05-95db-966b9460d3ac memory-static-max=512000000

After these commands I checked my VM memory requirements and got the following:

xe vm-param-list uuid=f0ddc908-79a9-ea0f-7a22-17c8c4bd983c | grep ” memory-”
memory-actual ( RO): 0
memory-target ( RO): 0
memory-overhead ( RO): 1048576
memory-static-max ( RW): 512000000
memory-dynamic-max ( RW): 512000000
memory-dynamic-min ( RW): 512000000
memory-static-min ( RW): 512000000

I am back with new information on XCP and the steps I used to launch a HVM guest from a CD on my XCP server. I will also be adding another blog posting about the memory issues I faced during this procedure but are probably not a common issue for most people with large enough servers.

GOAL – Use the Command Line Interface to build and launch a HVM guest from a CD of Oracle Enterprise Linux Release 5 Vol 4 for x86 (32-bit)

Step 1 - Connect to XCP Server from remote machine; I opened a terminal window and entered the following command: ssh -l root IP ADDRESS

Results:
stephen@stephen:~/Documents/Blog$ ssh -l root IP ADDRESS
root@IP Address’ password:
Last login: Wed Mar  3 17:33:54 2010 from IP ADDRESS
Type “xsconsole” for access to the management console.
[root@xenserver-reiazupz ~]#

Step 2 – I leveraged the existing XCP documentation found at http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/Command_Line_Interface or http://www.xen.org/files/XenCloud/guest.pdf (Chapter 4; Page 21).

a) Place the Linux Install CD in the CD drive on the XCP Machine
b) Run the command xe template-list

Results (shortened for required information):
uuid ( RO)                : 5a3ee06c-3078-cec0-015c-a19cf3c7799d
name-label ( RW): Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.0
name-description ( RW): Template that allows VM installation from Xen-aware EL-based distros. To use this template from the CLI, install your VM using vm-install, then set other-config-install-repository to the path to your network repository, e.g. http://<server>/<path> or nfs:server:/<path>

c) Run  xe vm-install template=”<template_name>” new-name-label=<name_for_vm>
* <template_name> is from above Results, “Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.0″
* <name_for_vm> is your choice, I chose “oraclevm”
RESULTS – The UUID of the new oraclevm => vm_uuid

d) Run xe vbd-list vm-uuid=<vm_uuid> userdevice=0 params=uuid –minimal
RESULTS – The Root Disk UUID => root_disk_uuid

e) xe vbd-param-set uuid=<root_disk_uuid> bootable=false
RESULTS: No Output

f) Run  xe cd-list to get the name  of the CD Drive on the XCP machine
RESULTS: CD Drive name (e.g. SCSI 0:0:0:0) => host_cd_drive_name_label

g) Run xe vm-cd-add vm=<vm_name> cd-name=”<host_cd_drive_name_label>” device=3
RESULTS:No Output

h) Run xe vbd-list vm-uuid=<vm_uuid> type=CD params=uuid –minimal
RESULTS: CD VM UUID  => cd_drive_uuid

i) Run xe vbd-param-set uuid=<cd_drive_uuid> bootable=true
RESULTS: No Output

j) Run xe vm-param-set uuid=<vm_uuid> other-config:install-repository=cdrom
RESULTS: No Output

k) Run xe vm-start uuid=<vm_uuid>
RESULTS: No Output

At this point, the VM will start on your XCP machine and you should hear the CD Drive start working. To install the OS within the VM I again chose to use OpenXenCenter and was able to connect easily to my XCP machine and install the OS via the VM Console window. See image below:

As I mentioned at the start of this example, I will be adding another blog to detail the memory issues I had in launching this new VM on my XCP machine. Also, I am still waiting for my Windows 7 CD to arrive in the mail and will post another blog with instructions to launch Windows on XCP.

As we have completed another month, I have updated the Project Golden Ratio tracking sheet with February 2010 data. It is important to remember that February only has 28 days so some of the data items are a bit smaller but the trends on monthly statistics are already clear. The complete data set is  here.

Some highlights that I found interesting:

• Xen Cloud Platform home page is now #4 in page hits
• Document Support page continues to receive 3x hits compared to Community Support page
• Number 1 blog posting for month was Xen HA Cluster Demo Videos with 936 views; confirms my belief that we need more how to videos on Xen.org
• Xen.org Solution Search Tool – strong number of product hits with 3,864 and an amazing 16.33% click thru rate
• Xen-users mailing list had an 80.39% answer rate down from 89.76% in January; March data will give us a sense of where the average is

As usual, if you have any ideas for items to track or other feedback please email me or add a comment to this message.

Thanks to everyone for voting on the Xen.org Mascot Contest. I have closed the first round of voting and we have three clear favorites for the finals:

Entry #5 – Zen Penguin from Dana Rawding
Entry #1 – Bonsai Tree form Joe Shon
Entry #10 – Sitting Panda Chewing Bamboo from Valentin Höbel

Thanks to all the people who submitted their ideas for this contest. There was a good selection of choices for the community to select from.

The next phase in the contest is to work with an artist to create several sample mascot ideas for each of the entries. These images will be used in the final vote as the Xen.org community selects a mascot.

If anyone out there would like to volunteer their design services please contact me soon as I will begin looking for a designer for this project next week.

I have added a new community member spotlight for March – Thiago Martins. Thiago is currently the maintainer of the Xen Live CD and is active on the xen mailing lists as well as working full time at WorldWeb Internet Hosting as an IT Manager . His full profile is here.

If you would like to nominate someone for the community member highlight section, please contact me.

We are very pleased to introduce ConVirt 2.0 – the next major step up in open source virtualization management. The ConVirt 2.0 generation combines a flexible, open architecture, the highest level of management capabilities, and the industry’s most flexible pricing model.  Built on a brand-new, 3-tier architecture, ConVirt 2.0 includes a highly interactive, web-based user interface, a new data repository, advanced automation, enterprise scalability, multi-user administration, a full suite of integration capabilities, and much more.

http://www.convirture.com/blog/2010/announcements/introducing-convirt-2-0/

- ConVirt Team

New release candidates are available:
http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-3.4-testing.hg (tag 3.4.3-rc3) http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-unstable.hg (tag 4.0.0-rc5)

Please test! I think both of these are pretty close to final now.

Welcome to the new Xen.org weekly newsletter with a variety of information to keep you updated on all things Xen. This newsletter is an upgrade from my previous weekly communications and is meant to offer a broader scope of Xen.org activities. Please feel free to contact me with suggestions for the newsletter.

Xen News

• Xen.org Mascot Contest – Please submit your vote by Sunday night as I will declare the three finalists on Monday
• Xen.org Interview with The BitSource.com – http://www.thebitsource.com/open-source/xen-in-antarctica/
• Xen.org at SCALE – http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/02/22/xen-booth-at-scale-picture
• The CafePress Xen Store (http://www.cafepress.com/xen_org) is having a sale on clothing – 20% of using code APP20

Xen Events

• Xen Summit North America at AMD April 28-29, 2010
  • Speaker Topics Submission – Submit at http://xensummit.org
  • Local Hotels – http://www.xen.org/files/xensummit_amd10/HotelListing.pdf
• Citrix Synergy May 11 – 13 in San Francisco, CA – Looking for booth volunteers
• SouthEast LinuxFest 2010 June 12-13, 2010 in Spartanburg, SC – Looking for booth volunteers
• Bring Xen.org to an event near year – Do you know of an event near you that would be served by having a Xen.org booth? If so, I have a proposal for working together to support that event; http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/01/28/bring-xen-org-to-your-local-event/

Xen Products

• Xen 4.0 Release Candidate 4 Available for Testing – http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-unstable.hg TAG = 4.0.0-rc4

Xen Members in Action

• MAJOR thanks to Heechul Kim from South Korea who attended the SCALE event to show his management product as well as answer Xen questions
• Boris Quiroz and Marco Sinhoreli are currently drafting a new article on Xen Cloud Platform for Linux Magazine in Brazil
• Thanks to Marco Sinhoreli, Keith Coleman, Carpathia Hosting, and Anatoliy Poloz for offering to assist with a mirror site for XCP downloads; still working to enable this feature for Xen.org
• Seb Spiers who is assisting in the creation of new online forums for Xen.org community; expect to see these forums in a few weeks to replace current trial forum on Zoho
• Xen.org Mailing Lists SuperStars – Ian Tobin, James Troup, Daniel Stodden, George Dunlap, Jan Beulich, and Ravi Kerur

Xen Weekly Stats

• Project Golden Ratio Statistics will be posted on Monday next week as the month of February closes – this is the first opportunity for the community to see monthly comparison data

The complete newsletter with all data including the summary of all xen-users/xen-devel/xen-api mailing lists can be found at http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenUpdate20100226.

The CafePress Xen Store (http://www.cafepress.com/xen_org) is having a sale on clothing – 20% of using code APP20

Attention all speakers for Xen Summit at AMD in April:

The time is NOW to submit your topic for consideration at http://xensummit.org . The event program committee is waiting for your submissions to review and place into the event agenda. Please let me know if you have any questions.

At SCALE this past weekend, I did a short interview with The BitSource.com. The Bitsource is an online publication and research lab with a primary focus on IT operations and Web development. The Bitsource brings together best-in-class research, reviews, and most importantly; the people who make it happen.

From the interview…

I had the chance to speak with Stephen Spector of Xen.org about his work on this exciting virtualization project. We spoke about the basics of Xen, Xen development, and Xen in Antarctica, which is one of the goals for the Xen Around the World project.

What does Xen do?

Xen is a collaboration between industry giants, universities, and hobbyists to provide an open source (GPLv2) hypervisor for server virtualization. The hypervisor provides a layer between the guest and the hardware allowing for multiple operating systems to be run on the same server.

Full  interview is here.

Finally, if you visit the BitSource home page and people page you will see that I am listed with such heavyweights as Mark Shuttleworth, Eric Hammond, Brian Behlendorf, Justin Erenkrantz, and Clem Cole.  Xen.org is moving up in the world to be listed with such groups as Apache, USENIX, Canonical, etc.

The blog maintenance is complete.

I am taking the blog down to upgrade WordPress. Please Stand By…

I am on my way home from LA to Florida and wanted to send an update to the community on the Xen.org promotion at SCALE this weekend:

• Booth – There was plenty of traffic over the 2 day event at the booth and I had the opportunity to learn about open source Xen installations at MySpace, Ticketmaster, and Edmunds.com. Heechul Kim from South Korea attended the event and showed his open source Xen management solution as well as assisted in the many Xen questions. I have added a picture from my iPhone of myself and Heechul at the booth.
• Xen Presentation – Over 60 people attended the Xen.org presentation on Sunday at 3pm to learn more about the community, our solutions, and how to participate. I was pleased with the turnout as the presentation slot was near the end of the event and people tend to leave early. There were plenty of questions asked and the audience was engaged – I have already received 3 responses from attendees on new features for Xen as well as feedback on content for future presentations on Xen. A local Citrix SE assisted at the booth today and presented the new Citrix Xen Client solution. The audience was very interested in this solution and we need to start working on a management solution for XCI so I can demo open source XCI at a future event.

Overall, I was pleased with the positive response that Xen received from the attendees who were interested to learn about our hypervisor solution and enjoyed the opportunity to meet with significant customers of open source Xen. I have invited MySpace and Edmunds.com to attend Xen Summit North America as presenters to give the community a chance to learn about their highly scalable and complex Xen installations.  I will have more images and some video from SCALE posted later this week.

PS – Check out the Xen Candy give away – way better than shirts.

Can a Chameleon Change its Spots?

I had lunch today with veteran virtualization blogger Alessandro Perilli, who was in the Seattle area for the Microsoft MVP Summit. Alessandro has repeatedly been the first to spot key industry trends. He is truly plugged-in, and brings to his analysis a level of technical insight and honesty that I find refreshing, and he doesn’t sensationalize just to get clicks.

We discussed the recent flurry of reporting on the fact that Novell is also developing for KVM, and it was good to see that Alessandro found this as unsurprising as I do. Novell SUSE Linux is, after all an enterprise Linux distribution. And KVM is just a kernel.org driver that comes with mainline Linux. So it’s logical to expect Novell’s customers to be aware of KVM and to expect them to ship and support it – like any other mainline feature. Indeed Novell’s activity on KVM has never been a secret – they announced a preview of KVM support in SLE 11 and have a roadmap for offering full support in due course.

…

Full post at http://community.citrix.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=116034454.

Great Picture from SCALE 8x….