Citrix XenServer Upgrade From 6.1 to 6.2

This weekend I’ve updated from 6.1 to 6.2. Here are the steps I took to do the upgrade.

  1. Make sure you have upgraded your licenses to 6.2 (May require login).  They have changed to a per socket structure, for us we have two sockets per server, and was able to upgrade without paying extra.  The upgrade will warning you if you don’t have the 6.2 license, but you can continue on… just make sure you’ve got the new 6.2 license is applied to your license server.
  2. Download the XenServer-6.2.0-install-cd.iso file (May require login)
  3. I uploaded the file to a physical linux web server not part of my Xen pool
  4. Create a directory called ‘xen’ in the root of your web site
  5. Mount the ISO as a loop device:
    sudo mount -o loop XenServer-6.2.0-install-cd.iso xen/
  6. Update XenCenter.msi to the latest version. After updating XenCenter, “About XenCenter” shows my version as “6.2 (build 1377)”
  7. Backup your XenServer Pool, ssh into your pool master and run this command.  Copy into your backups on a file server
    xe pool-dump-database file-name=xenpool.backup.20140510
  8. Disable HA
  9. Shutdown any unneeded VMs, this will decrease the time it takes to preform the upgrade
  10. To preform the upgrade, in XenCenter goto Tools -> Rolling Pool Upgrade
  11. Select your pool
  12. Select ‘Automatic Mode’
  13. Obey the rules of the pre-check
  14. Run the upgrade.  I had a few issues and had to restart the rolling upgrade, which didn’t seem like an issue.  My issues were mostly VMs loosing their VDIs, which can be fixed via this article.

Citrix XenServer 6.1 Internal error: File “xapi_xenops.ml”, line 1788, characters 3-9: Assertion failed

Today I rebooted a xen host, everything came back up as I would expect, and after trying to live migrate VMs back onto the host I got this error message.

Internal error: File "xapi_xenops.ml", line 1788, characters 3-9: Assertion failed

I thought it was something wrong with xencenter, but then tried via command line and got this error:

Error code: SR_BACKEND_FAILURE_46
Error parameters: , The VDI is not available [opterr=VDI SOME-UUID already attached RW]

 

The message “The VDI is not available” I’ve seen many times before and I knew what to do.

 

 

Configure SNMP on Citrix XenServer 6.x

I love Cacti and use it all the time to monitor my system performance.  Here are the few steps needed to turn SNMP on with in your Citrix XenServer hosts.  This document assumes you already have Performance Monitoring Enhancements Pack for XenServer, SNMP, and Cacti already installed and functioning on your network.

  1. Edit: /etc/sysconfig/iptables
    Add the following lines AFTER the line “-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p udp –dport 5353 -d 224.0.0.251 -j ACCEPT”
    -A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p udp --dport 161 -j ACCEPT
    -A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p udp --dport 162 -j ACCEPT
  2. Execute: service iptables restart
  3. Edit: /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf
    Replace the community with your current SNMP community if you have one.
    # sec.name source community
    com2sec notConfigUser default public
  4. Execute: chkconfig snmpd on
  5. Execute: service snmpd restart
  6. Test from another host: snmpwalk -v 2c -c public xenserver.someplace.com
    Note, replace public with your SNMP community!

Citrix XenServer 6.1 – XenServer Tools out of date (version 6.0 installed)

Recently we upgraded our XenServer resource pool to 6.1 because the new feature allowing you to do live migration of VDI’s sounds unreal.  I still get amazed that this stuff works, well most of the time.  Now we are having issues with XenTools reporting to be out of date in XenCenter, I see the message:

XenServer Tools out of date (version 6.0 installed)

Great, I’ll just pop the XenTools CD in, uninstall the old version, and install the new version.  Nope, that does not work.  Instead it makes the issues worst, as you try and reboot the system but XenServer never figures out the server is shutdown and you end up having to do vm-reset-powerstate or even destroy the domain.  Either way this sucks.

Citrix just updated it’s XenServer blog yesterday acknowledging the issues with XenTools is real and they will try and fix their processes.  And they are right, this sort of thing really does hurt your confidence in the system.  And we all know virtualization is built on confidence.

Now here is the real place to get all the info on what needs to happen.  It’s a two part update, first you need to apply hot fix XS61E009 and then XS61E010.  Then you have the fun of updating XenTools.  But lots of work non the less when you have 10s, 100s, 1000s of VMs.

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX135099
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX136252
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX136253

*UPDATE*

If you run in to blue screen on Windows while installing the new XenTools from the XS61E010… I know more issues??  If you can get into safe mode to remove xentools from the machine and reinstall, that may work.  Other wise you can try looking yup your VMs UUID and changing the device ID.  This may work if your VM does not get the correct device ID set during the new xentools install. Use this command:

xe vm-param-set uuid=<vm_uuid> platform:device_id=0001

or

xe vm-param-set uuid=<vm_uuid> platform:device_id=0002