Deploy DCE in Xenserver (XCP-ng)

jzurera · ‎2021-11-22

Hi Team,

is it possible to deply DCE virtual machine in Xenserver (XCP-ng) platform? We have tried with the OVA and it did not work, but I know that there is a ISO file for New Intastall or restore to default. Can we use this ISO in this platform?

I have attached a picture with the options that we have in Xenserver Captura de pantalla (003).png

Thanks in advance.

Shaun · ‎2021-11-25

Hi,

So - first up I should say I haven't used Xen in the last decade - pretty much since KVM became an option - and haven't used XenServer at all (which is, or was, built on top of Xen). So take this with a grain of salt, there's going to be a lot of "educated guesses" here.

When you do the first-time setup via the console, and login as apcsetup - ensure you're asking for the private network to be configured there - just to make sure we're not overlooking the obvious. If it doesn't give that option, we're probably not finding the second network interface where we expect to, and it's all going to to go wrong from there.

So what we're most likely seeing is not that XCP is actually doing something wrong, it's just not doing it the same way vmware does - especially what network device it emulates. So network devices aren't where we expect them to be, and hence we don't detect them properly. (specifically, I think we normally emulate/paravirtualize an e1000 in vmware, whereas Xen uses it's own netfront driver to pass links between rings without pretending there's hardware at all)

So my guess is we do have the driver for this device - else you'd have no networking at all - but it may not be naming the devices as eth0, eth1, etc (different drivers can have different naming conventions) so we can't detect & configure the additional devices.

Most of this boils down to why we don't support deployments on platforms that we haven't specifically targeted and tested for - there's a lot of little details that can go wrong, and assumptions that can fail. Unfortunately in cases like that there's not much we can do - it's really going to boil down to "the more it acts like a platform we do support, the more success you'll have" - and Xen (and kvm) can be particularly strange on that front as they avoid emulating hardware devices where possible, so we don't find the hardware we're looking for.

See Answer In Context

Shaun · ‎2021-11-22

Hi,

VMWare ESXi / vSphere is the only platform we support for this, and the only platform we test against. From experience -

I've not seen anyone have any success with xen or libvirt - especially when using Xen's virtual block devices (eg /dev/xvd*)
I've seen temporary success with hyper-V and virtualbox, but have seen many issues with upgrading these installations.
I've seen better success with vmware's workstation products, but we don't support this either.

Based on real-world issues I've seen from those who have tried and failed; I would strongly recommend sticking to esxi for production use, and stress that this is the only solution that's supported. Workstation may work for small proof-of-concepts, but may struggle to scale, and again, isn't supported. For other platforms I'm afraid you're very much on your own - I can only recommend to backup often.

jzurera · ‎2021-11-25

Hi Shaun,

finally the customer deployed DCE 7.8.1 over Xenserver, but I do not know how...

We have seen that DCE does not view the private network lan configured in the hypervisor.

Other thing that is not working properly is when we try to launch the device view inside DCE client. We have tried outside DCE client and it works with other browser, but with the inside browser does not work with the correct values configured. Is it possible that this problem is caused by the Xenserver Hypervisor?

Thanks in advance.

Shaun · ‎2021-11-25

Hi,

So - first up I should say I haven't used Xen in the last decade - pretty much since KVM became an option - and haven't used XenServer at all (which is, or was, built on top of Xen). So take this with a grain of salt, there's going to be a lot of "educated guesses" here.

When you do the first-time setup via the console, and login as apcsetup - ensure you're asking for the private network to be configured there - just to make sure we're not overlooking the obvious. If it doesn't give that option, we're probably not finding the second network interface where we expect to, and it's all going to to go wrong from there.

So what we're most likely seeing is not that XCP is actually doing something wrong, it's just not doing it the same way vmware does - especially what network device it emulates. So network devices aren't where we expect them to be, and hence we don't detect them properly. (specifically, I think we normally emulate/paravirtualize an e1000 in vmware, whereas Xen uses it's own netfront driver to pass links between rings without pretending there's hardware at all)

So my guess is we do have the driver for this device - else you'd have no networking at all - but it may not be naming the devices as eth0, eth1, etc (different drivers can have different naming conventions) so we can't detect & configure the additional devices.

Most of this boils down to why we don't support deployments on platforms that we haven't specifically targeted and tested for - there's a lot of little details that can go wrong, and assumptions that can fail. Unfortunately in cases like that there's not much we can do - it's really going to boil down to "the more it acts like a platform we do support, the more success you'll have" - and Xen (and kvm) can be particularly strange on that front as they avoid emulating hardware devices where possible, so we don't find the hardware we're looking for.