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Wednesday 29 September 2010

Appliance lock Regkeys

When using the Citrix Appliance lock if you ever need to disable the Windows logon settings to stop using the PNAAgent at log on change the following reg key from

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
"Shell"="C:\Program Files\Citrix\ICA Client\pnagent.exe"

To

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
"Shell"="Explorer.exe"

This will enable Windows Explorer to start during Windows logon and not the PNAAgent.

Tuesday 28 September 2010

XenServer Storage Test VM

Please check out www.kaztechsolutions.co.uk for more of my technical posts, alternately please call us on 01932 268289. 

PerformanceVM is a XenServer virtual machine that helps troubleshoot performance related issues such as poor performance casued by storage I/O and network I/O. The VM built on Debian Linux equips with following test utilities and is accessible via a web based user interface:

Disk I/O performance utility
It can be used to conduct the following disk I/Os to measure: sequential read/writes and random read/writes with various specified block sizes.

Network I/O performance utility
It is essentially a modified version of netperf. Additional information about netperf can be found at http://www.netperf.org. Netperf runs on the backend and provides end-to-end request/response round trip latency and TCP/UPD throughout tests.

download the VM from the following locations http://xenbits.xensource.com/export/1/perfmon/PerfVM1_0.zip and Import the VM in to XenCenter.


Running PerformanceVM

Access the console
1. SSH into the PerformanceVM’s IP address.
2. Enter the 'root' user name and password. The root user log on credentials are:
User name: root
Password: xensupport

Start the web server
1. Start the web service using the script and the IP address of the virtual machine:
/start.sh [XenPOOLMASTERAddress]
2. When prompted for a password, enter:
The password for [XenPOOLMASTERAddress]
3. A prompt to inflate thin provisioned VDIs will be presented. Answer yes or no.

Note: If the Disk I/O test returns values that are off of the graph, then the above steps
probably need to be run in order to accurately reflect the performance.


4. In a web browser, enter http://[PerfVMAddress ]:8888/ to start testing.

Note: If XenServer hasn’t reported the VM’s IP address yet to XenCenter, the scripts will fail to run.

Network I/O Performance Utility
Running the Network utility requires that Netserver be installed on a remote system. This can be downloaded from the Network I/O utility page. Netserver can be installed on a Linux VM or dom0 at a remote site, where the destination testing will occur. Start Netserver before running any network performance tests.

Disk I/O performance utility
Running the Disk Utility will show real time performance of the specified disk. Access to Dom0 is required to access the performance data, but Dom0 is not modified. It can be run on master or slave machines.

Additional results are provided and will show up to the last 10 minutes of a test period. This will include various other counters along with the Disk results. Final results are graphed on a separate results page.

Friday 24 September 2010

How to increase XenServer HA TimeOut

Use the following two commands from CLI to increase the HA timeout on your XenServer, first you have to disbale HA then re-enable HA via the CLI with the timeout switch. I've found that 120 seconds works best but it all depends on your environment and what suits your needs best.

xe pool-ha-enable heartbeat-sr-uuids=ad1983ed-66cb-8fd7-1ef5-66a41c9d4345 ha-config:timeout=XX

Obviously change the SR UUID to the UUID of your own SR and where =XX change this to the number of seconds to wait until HA kicks in by default, it is 30 seconds.

NOTE: to get your list of SR UUID's type xe sr-list in the console

Separating the Roles of DDC's in a XenDesktop Farm

Each Desktop Delivery Controller machine in the farm can potentially become the farm master in an election process. This election process can be influenced by settings on the various server machines, and one (or more) machines can be indicated as preferred as being farm master, and other machines only take on the farm master role if the preferred machines are unavailable. This preference indication is achieved by use of registry entries on the various server machines. Each machine can be configured to have one of four possible settings:

• Master – servers with this setting are preferentially chosen as the farm master. Often, only one server in the farm would have this setting.

• Backup - servers with this setting are preferentially chosen as the farm master when the master server is unavailable.

• Member - servers with this setting are normally not the farm master, but can assume the farm master role when none of the master or backup servers are available.

• Slave Only - servers with this setting are not eligible to be the farm master.

To configure a server machine to one of these settings, perform the following steps.

Caution! This procedure requires you to edit the registry. Using Registry Editor incorrectly can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Citrix cannot guarantee that problems resulting from the incorrect use of Registry Editor can be solved. Use Registry Editor at your own risk. Back up the registry before you edit it.

1. Set the HKLM\Software\Citrix\IMA\RUNTIME\UseRegistrySetting DWORD registry entry to 1

2. Set the desired master ranking value in the HKLM\Software\Citrix\IMA\RUNTIME\MasterRanking DWORD registry entry to one of the following values:

• 1 indicates ‘Master’
• 2 indicates ‘Backup’
• 3 indicates ‘Member’
• 4 indicates ‘Slave Only’

3. Restart the server

Tuesday 21 September 2010

Enabling better PVS Logs

ere how to turn on better logging:

Console log file: “c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\citrix\provisioning server\eeapi.log”
Config file: “c:\program files\citrix\provisioning server console\enterpriseaccess_log.config”

Stream process log file: “c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\citrix\provisioning server\stream.log”
Config file: “c:\program files\citrix\provisioning server\stream_log.config”

Soap server log file: “c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\citrix\provisioning server\soapserver.log”
Config file: “c:\program files\citrix\provisioning server\soapserver_log.config”

MCLI log file: “c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\citrix\provisioning server\mcli.log”
Config file: “c:\program files\citrix\provisioning server\mcli_log.config”

In each case, the .config file controls the level output according to the “level value” entry towards the bottom of the file:




The three levels are ERROR, DEBUG and TRACE with ERROR being the default value installed with the product. DEBUG will be the most useful for diagnosing customer issues. The corresponding service does not require restarting after the log level has been changed.

Get some logs and we can start to troubleshoot.

Thursday 16 September 2010

Change Pool Master via CLI

First disable high availability:
xe pool-ha-disable


Now list your XenServer hosts:
xe host-list


Using the list above, designate a new pool master by supplying the uuid associated with the desired host:
xe pool-designate-new-master host-uuid=


You’ll probably lose connection to the pool at this point, but that’s normal behavior. Once XenCenter reconnects (this should happen automatically), it’s safe to re-enable high availability:
xe pool-ha-enable

Wednesday 15 September 2010

XenServer CLI - Commands

Please check out www.kaztechsolutions.co.uk for more of my technical posts, alternately please call us on 01932 268289. 

Since there is so many command within XenServer sometimes its hard to remember which command you require. This is just a list of regular commands that I use but please feel free to point out your favourite commands.

To find anything with the word "Server1" in messages logs. Obviously change the word to what you require but if you'r having a problem with a server named Server1 of instances you can enter the command below to filter out any information with Server1 in the logs.

grep Server1 /var/log/messages

To list your interfaces so you can identify the right UUID for your network device.

xe pif-list

To list full device details for the network device. TIP: once you have the UUID's of all of your interfaces simply enter the first couple of characters of the UUID interface and then press tab to fully populate the UUID.

xe pif-param-list uuid=(UUID of pif)

In XenServer 5 FP 1 you have the option to use vSwiches instead of the traditional bridging technology, the default install of XenServer does not have this enabled so you will have to run the following command to enable it. NOTE: you have to restart your XenServer after you have entered this command.

xe-switch-network-backend openvswitch


With XenServer it recommended that turn off auto-negotiation, set duplex to Full, and speed to 1000 using the Command Line Interface (CLI). To do this first find the UUID of the storage interface using the following command.

xe pif-list

Next set the parameters of the physical interface (PIF) using the following commands.

xe pif-param-set uuid= other-config:ethtool-autoneg=”off”
xe pif-param-set uuid= other-config:ethtool-speed=1000
xe pif-param-set uuid= other-config:ethtool-duplex=”full”


Restart the XAPI service because it controls networking on the XenServer, an alternative option is to reboot the XenServer. If you are in a pool, the above changes must be done on each storage PIF of the XenServers.

With XenServer its sometimes necessary to restart the iSCSI service on a XenServer, to do so run the following command from the CLI

service open-iscsi restart

Some times in XenCenter you'll get a VM that's in a "halted" state and you cannot even perform a force shutdown/reboot and even a xe-toolstack-restart will not shutdown the VM. To run a force restart from a CLI command run the following commands.

xe vm-shutdown -u root vm-name=vm_name
xe vm-shutdown -u root vm-id=vm_UUID


NOTE: you can change the shutdown option to either boot or retart to change the function you want.

xe help –all|more Show a list of XenServer CLI commands
• xsconsole Runs up the XenServer text based console
• xe-toolstack-restart Restarts the XenServer management tools
• ls –l List files in a Directory
• less /var/log/dmesg Display Boot Messages from Linux
• xe host-dmesg Xen Hypervisor Boot messages
• tail –f /var/log/xensource.log Look at xapi messages as they happen
• tail –f /var/log/xensource.log | grep xxx Look at xapi messages only for vm uuid xxx
• tail –f [log name] > [target filename] Send output to a file for analysis later
• cat /etc/xensource-inventory Display XenSource Inventory info
• xen-bugtool –yes Build a status report when xapi is down
• xe-backup-metadata -d –u [uuid of SR] Back up Pool metadata for all VMs
• tcpdump –i [inf] –vvv –w [filename] Get a Packet trace from [inf]. E.g. Inf=eth0, xenbr0, vif2.0 etc.
• top List the top processes running in Dom0
• xentop List top Xen processes
• mpstat 5 Processor stats in Dom0
• vmstat 2 Virtual memory in Dom0
• netstat –s Networking statistics
• iostat -d 2 6 Storage traffic stats
• list_domains Lists VMs that are running
• fdisk –l List the disk partitions
• hdparm –t /dev/sda3 Device read times for sda3 (normally local SR)
• pvs Show local and remote LVHD SRs
• ll /dev/disks/by-id Look at disk partitions
• lvs List logical volumes (virtual disks)
• vgs List LVM volume groups
• cd /var/run/sr-mount Look at NFS SRs
• df -h Shows how much disk space you have left
• dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null iflag=direct bs=1M count=512 Read data performance from sdb.
• dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb oflag=direct bs=1M count=4096 Write performance on sdb. * Don’t use on disks with VMs on them!
• ifconfig Show info on NICs, virtual switches and vNICs
• brctl show Show info on virtual switches
• ethtool eth0 Info for NIC eth0
• mii-tool Info on NIC bonding
• iscsiadm -m discovery –type sendtargets –port 192.168.250.14 Discover iSCSI targets available to this server
• iscsiadm –m session Open iscsi sessions
• history Lists the history of commands you’ve used
• !136 Executes command #136 in the history
• history -w history-list.txt Writes the history info to a text file