Have a site that is running 3 physical SuSE10sp2 servers using SuSE XEN virtualization hosting 4-5 servers a piece. Wants to upgrade three host SuSE10 servers to SuSE11sp2 in place. First of all, wanted to see if this could be done, or if there is a better way of accomplishing this. Never done it before, so curious how entailed it could be from doing a regular SuSE10 server in place to SuSE11. With the virtual piece, just feels likes there some gotchas to it, but haven’t been able to find any docs on the process or if it is different. Any help would be appreciated.
Done this a couple of times, though in doing this I prefer doing a fresh install rather than an upgrade. Also note that SLES 11 SP3 is available (as of beginning of this month).
Before jumping in on a method, it’s important to know more about the current setup, for example;
-are the Xen servers running in a cluster? And ifso, what kind of clustering configuration is there?
-Is there a SAN in play? Ifso, what type/brand?
-How are the virtual servers getting their storage? Are you using file based disks or physical disks & how do the virtual servers connect to the storage?
-How are you currently managing the Xen servers, with the built in Virt-manager… or also something else?
… and any other specifics that you think might be relevant.
Cheers,
Willem
Here are his replies to your questions:
[QUOTE=Magic31;14657]Done this a couple of times, though in doing this I prefer doing a fresh install rather than an upgrade. Also note that SLES 11 SP3 is available (as of beginning of this month).
Before jumping in on a method, it’s important to know more about the current setup, for example;
-are the Xen servers running in a cluster? And ifso, what kind of clustering configuration is there? NO
-Is there a SAN in play? Ifso, what type/brand? NO
-How are the virtual servers getting their storage? Are you using file based disks or physical disks & how do the virtual servers connect to the storage? FILE BASED, LOCAL PHYSICAL DRIVES
-How are you currently managing the Xen servers, with the built in Virt-manager… or also something else? Built in VIRT Manager and remote connectivity to servers
… and any other specifics that you think might be relevant.
Cheers,
Willem[/QUOTE]
Ok, that seems a pretty straight forward server install, a little more detail would have been good. These Xen servers are only hosting the virtual servers, no other specific end user services that they might be running you would need to reconfigure?
These are already 64bit installs, right? As starting SLES 11 SP2, there is no more 32bit Xen hypervisor. You might want to double check that, also making sure the current hardware is fully capable.
Assuming the hosting Xen servers OS install is on separate partitions than those holding your vm data, you could first grab a copy of everything that’s in and under /etc/xen/ and any other server specific configuration you might want.
The virtual server configurations are found in /etc/xen/vm, with that note that these files reflect the way the vm’s were originally configured. If any changes to the configuration of the virtual servers have been made after that (adding disks, memory, etc), that’s something that you would need to reapply after importing the configurations on your new Xen host setup (using the “xm new /etc/xen/vm/[vm plain text configuration file]”
B.t.w., is there only one network bridge configured for the vm’s (e.g. do the vm’s only need LAN, or also DMZ, etc)?
It’s good to check for other configuration specifics. For example, I always also limit the memory for the management domain with the boot parameter dom0_mem & the “dom0-min-mem” & “enable-dom0-ballooning no” found in /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp. In my experience it’s still best to have those parameters in there for best host stability.
If you have inventoried all that’s needed, move on to install SLES 11 SP3 using the Xen host profile, choose to format the system partitions for the Xen host server and add any needed extra packages.
After install you should be able to boot with the Xen kernel, reimport (xm new) and readjust the vm configurations as needed (also note that the network bridge names might need adjusting so your vm has the working network connectivity).
-Willem