Hard Drive Failed

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Today we had a hard drive fail on our Voice-mail server.  Not a big issue however an issue that needs  immediate attention.  Straight-forward and simple process.  Order a new drive, install it and let the utility rebuild the data.  I love RAID-5 but our RAID-10 iSCSI SAN is even nicer.

Additional Space to VMs

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Now that we have the XenServers aware of the extra space we need to use it.  One reason we needed the additional space was to increase the size of the Home directory store.  This procedure is very simple but you need to make sure nobody is using the drive you are trying to expand.  I found the procedure on Citrix’s support pages but can no longer find it. It is a good think I documented what I did.

Summary

If a hard drive on one of your servers is running out of space and you have available space in your Storage the below instructions will walk you thought how to increase that Hard Drive space.

Procedure for XenServer 5.5

If you need additional Hard Drive space on a VM’s hard drive the following procedure will allow you to increase the drive capacity.

Increasing VM’s Hard Drive Capacity

  1. Ensure all users are not using the files on the drive you want to resize.
  2. In XenCenter detach the drive from the VM.
  3. Find the “drive” in your storage container
  4. Enter the properties window and increase to your desired size (providing the free space of the LUN is adequate).
  5. Re-attach to the VM.
  6. Enter Drive Maintenance on the VM.
  7. Right click on the existing volume and expand volume.
  8. Follow the prompts

Pretty easy.

Additional Space on XenServer

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Flooded WD

Shortly after installing our Dell Powervault 3200i iSCSI SAN we started running out of space.  Anticipating the worse I ordered four more 600 GB drives to double our capacity to 2.2TB.  Unfortunately, the Thailand Flood hit and we were out of luck.  Those who live there had it far worse than our hard drive space issues.  Many months, several unsuccessful orders at double the price, and increased pressure to start work on projects waiting on that space we finally secured the four drives we needed at pre-flood prices.

Installing the Drives into the SAN was as easy as; install into drive, enter configuration utility and make the extra space available.  However, letting XenServer know that there is added space available was a little tricky, at the same time not difficult. The instructions that follow are adapted to our use from the Citrix XenServer support pages.  We use several physical servers and Multi-pathing which required a few extra steps.  We have XenServer 5.6 but the 5.5 works perfectly.

If you have resized the LUN on which a iSCSI or HBA SR is based, use the following procedures to reflect the size change in XenServer:

iSCSI SRs with software initiator

  1. Shut down all virtual machines on the SR.
  2. Enter Maintenance mode on all physical servers.
  3. Turn off Multi-pathing on all servers.
  4. Note the Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) of the Storage Repository. Use the xe sr-list command on the XenServer host and identify the SR by its name label.
  5. Identify the Physical Block Device (PBD) UUID corresponding to the SR. Use the following command on XenServer: 
    # xe sr-param-list uuid=|grep PBD
    whereUUID> is the UUID of the SR noted in step 2.
  6. Unplug the Physical Block Device (PBD) corresponding to the Storage Repository. 
    # xe pbd-unplug uuid=
    where <PBD UUID> is the UUID of PBD noted in step 3.
  7. Plug the PBD. 
    # xe pbd-plug uuid=
    Note    : In previous versions of XenServer, explicit commands were required to resize the physical volume group of iSCSI and HBA SRs. These commands are now issued as part of the PBD plug operation and are no longer required.
  8. Turn on Multi-pathing
  9. Exit Maintenance Mode
  10. Power on the Virtual Machines.

Thurl Ravenscroft – “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch”

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Thurl Ravenscroft

Thurl Arthur Ravenscroft - 2/6/1914 - 5/22/2005

Since it is Christmas time I thought it would be interesting to put a face to the voice behind the popular Christmas Song; “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch”.  Mr. Thurl Arthur Ravenscroft.  All these years and just today I decided to look up this information.  Someone forgot to add his name to the credits of the Christmas special leaving assumed credit for the song going to go to Boris Karloff, the narrator of the cartoon.

For fifty years he was also the voice of Tony The Tiger. Again uncredited until the journal Advertising Age’s June 6, 2005 issue where Kellogg’s ran an ad honoring Ravenscroft.  The headline read: “Behind every great character is an even greater man.”