With the XenServer Windows client called XenCenter it is possible to manage multiple XenServer hosts, create virtual machines, watch the console of virtual machines, etc. One of the limitations I recently ran into (this is a luxury problem, I know) is that it doesn’t allow you to assign more than 8 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) to […]
Tag Archives: XenServer
Changing CPU and memory settings on XenServer VMs
You can change the CPU and memory settings of XenServer virtual machines using the API. XenServer allows you to set the priority of the virtual machine CPU (called weight), set a limit on the amount of CPU the virtual machine can use (called cap) and set the amount of memory the virtual machine gets. CPU […]
Increasing the size of an LVM volume
In a previous article we looked at LVM. This short article describes how to grow an existing volume by adding an extra disk to the system. Specifically, we use a XenServer guest VM with CentOS installed. The first disk of a XenServer guest VM is called xvda, the second disk (the one we added) is […]
Installing XenServer Tools on Ubuntu 10.04
Please note that this article was written in 2010. Since then XenServer 6 has been introduced which supports Ubuntu 10.04 and makes it a lot easier to install Ubuntu 10.04 with guest tools. Please take a look at this newer article which describes this procedure. XenServer supports a lot of Linux and Windows operating systems […]
Getting CPU, memory, disk and network metrics from XenServer
In a previous article we looked at getting CPU and memory metrics from XenServer. As noted in that article, as of version 5.5 of XenServer, the preferred way of getting virtual machine metrics is through HTTP calls to get RRD XML files. We showed how to revert to the old way of doing things, but […]
Using XenServer in a routed IP network
Hetzner is a hosting company in Germany where you can rent dedicated root servers per month. Using their KVM-over-IP setup, it is possible to install operating systems that are not available by default, such as XenServer by Citrix. With the machine, you get four public IP addresses. One of these addresses is given to you […]
Getting XenServer VM metrics in Java
XenServer is a product of Citrix that can run virtual machines on a set of physical hosts called a pool. There is an API that allows you to create programs that interact with the XenServer pool. There are some function calls that return metrics of the virtual machines and the physical hosts. Let us have […]