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XenServer and Dell Equalogic Help!

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nitrobass24

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - December 2009
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Ok so Xen has some plugin for equal logic to where it uses the san as a big data pool and creates the volumes on the SAN, opposed to us carving out a LUN and managing it from the SAN.

Well apparently there is a lookup table that tells Xen where all the volumes are for the VMs. This has gotten corrupted, and now our entire environment is down.

Does anyone here have any idea on what i can do?
Im at quite a loss and Citrix isnt being very helpful.
 
Oh man, that sounds awful. I have a bunch of EQL arrays we use for virtualization but have never trusted third party provisioning tools.

Do you have any LUN snapshots on the EQL array you can roll back to?
 
archivalbackup said:
Oh man, that sounds awful. I have a bunch of EQL arrays we use for virtualization but have never trusted third party provisioning tools.

Do you have any LUN snapshots on the EQL array you can roll back to?
Click to expand...

Well the volumes are there, and i can see them.
But what I dont have is the mapping of which volumes go to which VMs.

Im trying to figure out more about this lookup table in Xen. Apparently that is not stored on the SAN? If it was i would just roll back from a backup.

Well I was trying to sell the group on VMware, I think this might do it :)
 
I am not very familiar with Zen, but could this be stored in a database that you have a backup of?

VMware stores the disk locations in the .vmx which is stored on the lun. So if I ran into this issue with vmware, you would just browse the LUN's and right-click the .vmx and "add to inventory".
 
The configuration should be stored in the pool metadata. I take it you don't have a backup of that?
 
Ok so we figured out what happened.

Ok so this lookuptable (metadata) that tells xen where all the volumes is stored on all of the hosts. However this metadata for the equallogic adaptor is stored separately and we did not even know it existed separately from the rest of the metadata. When citrix came out and did the implmentation did not inform us of this, and its not in any of the documentation either.:mad: Since we didnt know this we did not have backups of it.

The other day the admin tried to create a new partition, but it was larger than the available space. So naturally Xen kicked back and said you cant do that. So he created a smaller one and off we went.

Well there is bug apparently in the code for the Xen Equallogic adaptor and this error kept occurring in the background. Well in Xen if you get the same error 10,000 times it is set to automatically delete this metadata. So in the logs we can see all these FORGET commands.

We called citrix and they had an o shit moment and sent the problem to development.

As of right now these systems have been down for 48hrs. We are currently going back and manually remapping all of the drives (trial and error).

So if you are using this xen eql adaptor, call citrix ask them where its stored so you can back it up manually.
 
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