dennis henry
ramblings of an IT professional
Total Memory on a Xen Node
Nov 22nd
I ran into an interesting issue the other day that I figured I’d make a post about in order for others. Since my company is getting more into Xen Hosting, I’ve tried to be at the forefront of the virtualization software for the company. We did run into an interesting issue though the other day when it came to determining the total amount of memory on a hardware node. Since we set up the Domain-0 to use only 512MB of memory, we were having a tough time determining how much total RAM is in the server. After googling for awhile and asking some co-workers, I discovered the following command:
xm info
This command shows quite a few interesting metrics including the total memory for the server. Using this I was able to easily discern the total amount of memory and write a quick script to compute total amount of memory:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | #!/bin/bash total_memory=$(xm info | grep total_memory | awk '{print $3}') remaining=$(xm info | grep free_memory | awk '{print $3 - 512}') used_memory=$((total_memory-remaining)) echo -e 'Total Memory:\t'$total_memory'MB ('$((total_memory/1024))'GB)' echo -e 'Memory Used:\t'$used_memory'MB ('$((used_memory/1024))'GB)' echo -e 'Remaining:\t'$remaining'MB ('$((remaining/1024))'GB)' |
Hope this helps anyone else trying to figure out accurate Xen Memory usage
Install Xen 3.4.3 on CentOS 5.x
Sep 10th
So I have had to install Xen 3.4.3 recently 3 different times so I thought I’d make a quick post regarding the best route I have found to do this. Please note, this may not be the most optimal route but it has worked well for me 3 times now:
yum install xen PyXML mesa-libGL yum remove xen python-virtinst libvirt-python libvirt xen-libs mkdir rpms cd rpms wget http://www.gitco.de/repo/xen3.4.3/libvirt-0.7.0-6.el5.x86_64.rpm wget http://www.gitco.de/repo/xen3.4.3/libvirt-client-0.7.0-6.el5.x86_64.rpm wget http://www.gitco.de/repo/xen3.4.3/libvirt-python-0.7.0-6.el5.x86_64.rpm wget http://www.gitco.de/repo/xen3.4.3/python-virtinst-0.500.0-1.el5.noarch.rpm wget http://www.gitco.de/repo/xen3.4.3/xen-3.4.3-1.el5.x86_64.rpm wget http://www.gitco.de/repo/xen3.4.3/xen-libs-3.4.3-1.el5.x86_64.rpm wget http://www.gitco.de/repo/xen3.4.3/glusterfs-client-2.0.8-1.el5.x86_64.rpm wget http://www.gitco.de/repo/xen3.4.3/glusterfs-common-2.0.8-1.el5.x86_64.rpm wget http://www.gitco.de/repo/xen3.4.3/fuse-2.7.4-1.rf.x86_64.rpm wget http://www.gitco.de/repo/xen3.4.3/libibverbs-1.1-1.x86_64.rpm rpm -ivh *.rpm
After that block, make sure you edit /etc/grub.conf to set the following lines:
---snip--- default = 0 ---snip--- kernel /xen.gz-3.4.3 dom0_mem=512m ---snip---
The first will set the xen kernel as the default and the second will limit dom0 to only be able to use 512m of memory, leaving the rest for your VEs. After these changes, go ahead and reboot. Let me know if this route works for you!
