Have a bit of a problem, performed a ‘migration’ of three windows 2003 servers from vmware to XEN. Process was painless, remove the vmware software and as qemu-img found the vmware files were raw; I simply re-named the files from xyz.vmdk to xyz.img. Imported the img file into XEN and booted all three servers, completed flawless. Tested servers, performance was acceptable, rdp, file tx-fer running the primary IT application assigned to them, all flawless.
I then attempted to install the SuSE Virtual Machine Driver Pack, very first server I attempted was totally flawless, ran the setup accepted the license it did it’s thing bamo I now have a SuSE Network Driver for Windows, Novell Xen Block SCSI Disk Device etc. Second server I tried, the installer began however after an hour it had not completed I was forced to re-boot the server (gracefully). Third server after about 15 minutes gave a process failed to start on boot error then appeared to install the driver pack, however it did not.
Odd thing is, the two servers that did not install the driver pack are performing MUCH better than the server that did install it! So I now wish to uninstall the driver pack to ensure that is what is causing the poor performance on server #1 however I cannot. The README says to uninstall run uninstal.exe from the \Program Files\ovell\XenDrv folder, that folder does not exist. If I run the uninstall.exe from it’s current location (on the desktop) it states to use uninistall.exe from the Program Files\ovell\pvdrv directory. So I copied the entire contents of the Virtual Machine driver pack to first XenDrv and ran the unistnall, then copied it to pvdrv both failed.
So my question is how the heck do I either 1. uninstall the driver pack or 2. ‘disable’ the driver pack (specifically I think the NIC is the culprit, but a full disable won’t break my heart so I can test things).
Have a bit of a problem, performed a ‘migration’ of three windows 2003
servers from vmware to XEN. Process was painless, remove the vmware
software and as qemu-img found the vmware files were raw; I simply
re-named the files from xyz.vmdk to xyz.img. Imported the img file into
XEN and booted all three servers, completed flawless. Tested servers,
performance was acceptable, rdp, file tx-fer running the primary IT
application assigned to them, all flawless.
I then attempted to install the SuSE Virtual Machine Driver Pack,
very first server I attempted was totally flawless, ran the setup
accepted the license it did it’s thing bamo I now have a SuSE Network
Driver for Windows, Novell Xen Block SCSI Disk Device etc. Second
server I tried, the installer began however after an hour it had not
completed I was forced to re-boot the server (gracefully). Third server
after about 15 minutes gave a process failed to start on boot error then
appeared to install the driver pack, however it did not.
Odd thing is, the two servers that did not install the driver pack
are performing MUCH better than the server that did install it! So I
now wish to uninstall the driver pack to ensure that is what is causing
the poor performance on server #1 however I cannot. The README says to
uninstall run uninstal.exe from the \Program Files\ovell\XenDrv folder,
that folder does not exist. If I run the uninstall.exe from it’s
current location (on the desktop) it states to use uninistall.exe from
the Program Files\ovell\pvdrv directory. So I copied the entire
contents of the Virtual Machine driver pack to first XenDrv and ran the
unistnall, then copied it to pvdrv both failed.
So my question is how the heck do I either 1. uninstall the driver pack
or 2. ‘disable’ the driver pack (specifically I think the NIC is the
culprit, but a full disable won’t break my heart so I can test things).
Thanks in advance for your help,
[/color]
Check /var/log/messages. You may find a helpful error message. Perhaps the
install didn’t complete successfully and a reinstall may resolve
performance issues?
If your maintenance is current, you can open a Service Request and have
someone help you.
Oy… I wish I could go into /var/log but alas it’s a Windows server so it’s not reporting much of anything useful. I probably will be contacting Novell today as I have support, I just didn’t want to blow a ticket if it was an easy copy this file here and re-run the executable type of fix.
I’m sure most of the community has seen the ‘tcp offload’ performance issues threads, chock this one up to the same fix. Generally you find disabling the TCP Checksum offload will fix performance issues, that was disabled for me by default with the SuSE pack driver. However I noted the TCP Large Send Offload (LSO) was enabled, I disabled that and bingo immediate improvement to the server. I will now be working on figuring out why the other two servers did not install the driver pack correctly.
Oy… I wish I could go into /var/log but alas it’s a Windows server so
it’s not reporting much of anything useful.[/color]
You said you were running under XEN so I was wondering if there were
any messages in your Dom0 logs.
You’re not the first and probably not the last to encounter issues
related to ‘TCP offload’.
I’m glad you were able to resolve your issue.
–
Kevin Boyle - Knowledge Partner
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I’m sure most of the community has seen the ‘tcp offload’ performance issues threads, chock this one up to the same fix. Generally you find disabling the TCP Checksum offload will fix performance issues, that was disabled for me by default with the SuSE pack driver. However I noted the TCP Large Send Offload (LSO) was enabled, I disabled that and bingo immediate improvement to the server. I will now be working on figuring out why the other two servers did not install the driver pack correctly.
Hope this helps a future frustrated admin.[/QUOTE]
How did you determine that the TCP LSO was the root cause (i.e., What were the symptoms)?
Were there any reference materials that you could share (e.g., links to articles that were particularly useful)?
