Issue 32: issues and feature-request

Reported by Michel Longuich, Jul 24, 2010

Hi Olivier,

We've already had email contact but i'd like to follow up on that 
publicly here. 

Let me start off saying your project looks promising. Plain and 
simple xen management. That's the reason I registered here after 
e-mailing with you about some things. 

What I think most (admin) xen users want who aren't willing to go 
the XCP/XVP or DTC route because of it's overkill-featureset, is a 
simple web-enabled panel or dashboard which can enable both users 
(vm tenants) aswell as admins to:

- start/stop/reset their vm's
- have a look at statistics like cpu/disk/bandwidth of their own vm 
aswell as how they compare to other tenants.
- possibly get console access for pv domu's
- pygrub support (!). (xm new/xm start, etc makes controling pygrub 
next to impossible.)
- simple (default) mysql support

I personally use too many different packages to control and monitor. 
Custom scripts to keep track of bandwidth, custom xen cpu 
monitoring/graphing. I even persuaded Steve Kemp to add some extras 
to xen-tools (pygrub, iscsi, etc support) to be able to stay away 
from do-it-all packages. Judging from the xen-users list many others 
like me struggle with the right combination of tools. I hope your 
XenOrchestra can help solve some of these issues.

btw. Like others have mentioned here I too had trouble getting mysql 
to work. I ended up giving the guest user admin rights just to have 
a look at what XO does. So I guess that would be one selling point 
if it gets solved.

cheers!
Michel

Comment 1 by Olivier Lambert, Jul 25, 2010

Hi Michel, 

Thanks for this report !
- start/stop/pause/reset/reboot is in XO since it exists, well !
- let's talk about stats : "instant" stats or 
"deeper" with history ? can be painful to store that kind 
of data (but a "snapshot" can be done easily). Maybe a 
special page for comparing all DomU's together can be done. 
- console access, hmm. ok I start to think about that. Nice idea. 
Note next version will integrate VNC support in a new tab when you 
click on it. 
- pygrub, I need to find a clear way to work with xm new and the 
bootloader..
- for mysql, I'll put my conf in attached file, retry with it. Did 
you execute script in "scripts" folder for creating users 
etc ? needs php5-cli package in order to run properly. 

Regards, 

Olivier.

xen-orchestra.conf - 1.92 kB

Status: Started
Owner: olivier

Comment 2 by Michel Longuich, Jul 25, 2010

Hi Olivier, 

> - let's talk about stats : "instant" stats or 
"deeper" with history ?

Mostly stats about "how much cpu is this vm hogging right now 
and what has it been doing the last couple of weeks or months. Same 
goes for bandwidth (or rather 'traffic').
I've been keeping traffic stats for a couple of years now and the 
database isn't that big (a couple of MB at best). What I do is add 
the amount of traffic for every 5 minutes. consolidate daily data - 
daily - after a week. consolidate after a month etc. Basic cronjobs 
do the database updates and rrd'ing. 

This is a typical example of custom scripting though. I take data 
from iptables' physdev rules on every Dom0. I'd love to get rid of 
that and get the data on a xo vm via xenapi if possible.

> - console access, hmm. ok I start to think about that. 

I fiddled around with an ajax ssh thingie a while ago. I just 
couldn't get it integrated into the main webinterface. The ajax ssh 
client logged into xen-shell.


> Note next version will integrate VNC support in a new tab when 
you click on it.

Nice. Especially for windows vm's
 

> - pygrub, I need to find a clear way to work with xm new and 
the bootloader..

That would probably involve getting console access integrated. 
Tricky.. I know.

> - for mysql, I'll put my conf in attached file

I'll have a go at it as soon as I find a reasonable amount of time. 
you might have 0.8 of XO out before that though. ;)

cheers,
Michel

Comment 3 by Michel Longuich, Dec 1, 2010

Just wondering..  
Has there been any progress with XO since .72 ? 

cheers

Michel

Xen Orchestra