Book Image

Citrix XenServer 6.0 Administration Essential Guide

By : Daniele Tosatto
Book Image

Citrix XenServer 6.0 Administration Essential Guide

By: Daniele Tosatto

Overview of this book

Virtualization helps an organization reduce costs and achieve low maintenance. It is fast becoming an important skill for all administrators. Citrix's XenServer is one of the leading virtualization solutions for enterprises and helps companies reduce costs while allowing them to integrate, automate and easily manage their datacenters. It comes with a steep learning curve, but the results are well worth the effort. This practical guide on XenServer administration shows you how to manage XenServer pools; create, configure and manage virtual machines and a datacenter. With the help of real-world examples in this book, you will be able to apply these concepts directly in your everyday life. Packed with author's tips and helpful advice; the book is your best choice for anything related to XenServer administration. This is the only book that focuses on the most vital aspect of XenServerñadministration. You don't have to struggle through the lesser-documented tasks anymore, this book will provide all the information you need to create and run a perfectly designed datacenter using XenServer.You will begin your journey towards becoming an expert XenServer administrator by configuring XenServer pools and managing role-based user authentication. Your next step is to create and manage virtual machines. In the following chapters you will learn to configure storage. The book discusses some of the more difficult tasks like configuring and managing VM memory. In the end you will be capable of handling your datacenter and virtual machines through a network, and you will learn how to monitor and backup your XenServer setup. All through the book, the author adds his helpful tips and advice that will help you choose the best options for your setup.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Citrix XenServer 6.0 Administration Essential Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Applying a hotfix or update using XenCenter


After we have introduced the main concepts, in the following example we will discover how to apply a hotfix using XenCenter to a XenServer host:

  1. Download the update file related to the hotfix you want to apply, from the Citrix Knowledge Center to a known location on a computer running XenCenter. Usually the update is provided as a zipped archive, so extract it before you proceed. In this example we install hotfix XS60E001.

  2. After you have extracted the archive file, you can notice that a folder containing two files, .xsupdate and .BZ2, has been created. The file .xsupdate is the file related to the update. The file .BZ2 is the file containing the source code used for compiling the update, and is provided by Citrix in order to respect the open source license agreement:

  3. Shut down or suspend any virtual machine that is running if you don't want to allow XenCenter to automatically migrate it to another host before applying the hotfix.

  4. Click on Tools | Install New Update in order to open the Install Update wizard:

  5. Click Next to proceed.

  6. In the Choose an existing update to install or upload a new one dialog, click on Add, and then browse to and select the hotfix file that you have downloaded. Once the update file has been added, click on Next to continue as shown in the following screenshot:

  7. Select the servers or the pool that you wish to update and click on Next. In this example, for the moment we update only the pool master xenserver1.

  8. Follow the recommendations to resolve any update pre-checks that have failed. In this example, two pre-checks fail because the virtual machine FreeNAS Server is not suspended or powered-off, and the update wizard requires the virtual machine to be shut down to perform the update because it cannot be migrated to another host.

  9. If you would like XenCenter to automatically resolve all failed pre-checks, click on Resolve All. After all pre-checks have been resolved, click on Next to continue as shown in the following screenshot:

  10. Choose between the automatic or manual update mode. If you choose automatic, XenCenter will perform any post-update actions that may be required, such as rebooting hosts. If you choose manual, you will need to perform the actions manually. The post-update actions required are listed in the Post-update tasks to be performed textbox. You can save the actions to a file for future reference.

  11. Click on Install update to proceed with the installation. During the update process, the Install Update wizard shows the progress of the update, displaying the major operations that XenCenter performs while updating each host in the pool.

Note that while the pool master is being updated, XenCenter will temporarily lose connection with the pool.

  1. Once the update is finished, click on Finish to close the Install Update wizard.

  2. If you have chosen to manually perform post-update actions, perform them in order to complete the update process.