Christian's picture
Christian - Wed, 2010/09/01 - 13:29

Hi,

I am using XenServer 5.5 on a remote machine where I cannot attach an ISO. XenServer 5.5 does not support the .ovf format. To import the appliance, I need an appliance package containing an .ova file. I wonder if you could provide the "core" appliance in this format?

Thanks!

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Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Thu, 2010/09/02 - 02:11

Although I'm not sure which versions they will work for. Liraz recently mentioned that he was uploading ESX/ESXi images and Xen images were to be uploaded soon after. If you look at TKL's SourceForge files you will see that the whole appliance range has been added with -xen.tar.bz2 at the end of the filename. I think it would be safe to assume these are Xen images. Have a go and let us know how it works out.

Christian's picture

Christian - Thu, 2010/09/02 - 09:18

Hi, unfortunately, the Xen images are "images", i.e. a tar'ed filesystem. They cannot be imported into the XenServer. Xen (the open sourced technology underlying XenServer) and XenServer seem to be very different products when it comes to migrating VMs. Here is a page that explains the difference between the XenServer (5.5) XVA and the OVF format:

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX121652

There seem to be some tools to convert between XenServer, OVF and VMWare:

http://www.xen.org/products/cloud_projects.html

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX116603

 

I can try to do this myself - but wondered if you had plans to support XenServer so I could save myself some trouble.

Thanks! 

Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Thu, 2010/09/02 - 13:37

Sorry I misunderstood. I'm not a TKL dev so I can't speak for them, but my suspicion is that if it is a proprietry format it won't be supported (at least not officially). And I'm 99% sure that they aren't currently.

sbscherer's picture

sbscherer - Fri, 2010/09/03 - 10:44

I still haven't figured it out yet, but it sounds like Liraz knows how to do it.  If you figure it out, please post directions.  See the post at the link below.

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/forum/general/20100819/turnkey-linux-and-tklpatch

Christian's picture

Christian - Fri, 2010/09/03 - 12:43

Yes, it would be good to have a word from Liraz before I dive into something where I not really know what I am doing ... :-)

sbscherer's picture

sbscherer - Mon, 2010/09/06 - 11:14

I spent several hours and gave up.  I know I was probably starting to get close, but I was getting errors I didn't understand, everything from the decompression of the tar.gz2 to the installation of the final live ISO.  I may be putting together my own appliances for a while.  

http://community.citrix.com/display/xs/Installing+Ubuntu+Server+10.04+(32bit+and+64bit)+LTS

Adrian Moya's picture

Adrian Moya - Tue, 2010/09/14 - 17:40

Announcement: 

 

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/forum/general/20100912/tklpatch-plone-4

Please provide some feedback. Thanks!

Christian's picture

Christian - Wed, 2010/09/15 - 08:11

I will try it out to upgrade my 3.3.5 instances as soon as I get to it. Thank you very much for your work! You should also announce it to the Plone community, e.g. here: http://plone.org/support/forums

Thanks!

C. 

Adrian Moya's picture

Adrian Moya - Wed, 2010/09/15 - 15:02

I prefer to wait until this appliance goes official to publish something in the Plone community. Maybe they can contribute testing the appliance, but I don't know if they will be willing to follow the patching procedure, not being TKL users.

Liraz Siri's picture

Liraz Siri - Tue, 2010/09/21 - 16:23
OK I've finally had a chance to take a look at this XVA XenServer format. From the looks of it I suspect the only reason Citrix decided to invent yet another proprietary format to facilitate vendor lock-in. Otherwise why not just use (or at least support!) the same formats supported by the open source version of Xen? I also find it suspicious that there is precious little documentation for converting XVA to other more standard formats.

That the official support toolset is Windows only is also incredibly boneheaded. Especially for a Linux based hypervisor. These guys obviously have developers who can develop full Linux support so I'm thinking the lack of support is no coincidence. Something is rotten in the kingdom of Citrix!

Bottom line, Citrix doesn't play nice with the open source community. I don't see why we should bend over backwards to support their intentionally crippled proprietary product.

In the meantime there should be reasonable workarounds for anyone unfortunate enough to be stuck on a XenServer deployment that doesn't support installation from ISO. Convert the OVF formats, install the ISO on another Citrix installation and export the XVA file, etc.

PS: Sorry for the late response.

Christian's picture

Christian - Tue, 2010/09/21 - 18:22

Liraz, I totally agree with you. I want to get rid of the XenServer, it was a bad choice to begin with. It is just that I spent so many hours to get this running ... I need to be able to migrate it while I reconfigure the server, the reason I came across TKL in the first place. So wish me luck!

C. 

Liraz Siri's picture

Liraz Siri - Tue, 2010/09/21 - 21:03
Best of luck and keep us posted! There are various shades of proprietary software evil and you seem to have been accidentally caught up in a particularly nasty one. Ugh. I didn't realize how bad Citrix XenServer was until looking into this today.

BTW, your comment on TKLBAM being the killer app that made you migrate to TurnKey was a big morale boost over here. Glad you're finding it useful!

Christian's picture

Christian - Wed, 2010/09/22 - 09:03

... the invention of the toaster! smiley Seriously, this will make my life just so much easier. I am not a professional sysadmin, and I don't plan to become one. As a web app developer, I have always hated to deal with things that I am not qualified for, at the same time being so dependent on them. Virtualization with secure and maintained VMs plus backup plus server independence/easy migration will be the key to my happiness (at least on the server front).

C. 

Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Mon, 2011/06/06 - 17:03

More just questioning the proprietry philosophy that results in lack of pre-created images. IMO open source philosophy results in higher level of community engagement. Were Citrix to operate in a more open way I'm sure TKL devs would be happy to support it with pre-created images. Still if you make convert TKL to XenServer images then you can migrate back and forth betyween your XenServer and AWS easily with TKLBAM.

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