Category: Business

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Business Technology

Converting Xen Appliances for XenServer Import

VM Servers

It is no secret that we use many Novell technologies at Martin Luther College to enable our faculty, staff, and students to get their work done. I’ve blogged about such things many times and I’ll be continuing to do so in the future. I have plans to bring Filr and ZENworks on campus soon to alleviate some specific needs we have and I have already deployed the new iPrint here to serve as part of our printing solution.

All three of these solutions have one things in common: they are available as virtual appliances for ease of deployment.

However, one hitch is that Novell only provides appliances for three virtualization platforms: VMware, Hyper-V, and Xen. XenServer, our platform of choice, is the one that is missing. The bare Xen image won’t do, initially, because it provides nothing more than a raw disk image and a configuration file.

Initially I just used the VMware image provided as an OVF which imported into our XenServer infrastructure just fine but was incomplete. I could not easily get the XenServer Tools installed and I still wanted to get the paravirtualized kernel so that I get some optimizations within XenServer. I also cannot easily take advantage of the high availability features of XenServer without the tools installed.

Workable, but no ideal.

This is how we are currently running the latest iPrint appliance (currently version 1.1). It has been working extremely well, but if I can find a way to run things in a more optimized way, I’m all for it. So I spent a day in IRC asking how I might be able to convert a Xen image to something more amenable to XenServer import.

Enter xva.py. A simple Python script “… to aid the migration of xend based Xen virtual machines to XenServer and Xen Cloud Platform.” That would do it! So I moved onto attempting the conversion of the Filr 1.1 appliance that was just released!

All of these steps are being done on Apple OS X but most steps should be transferable to any UNIX-like system. So let’s do this!

  1. Download the wanted Xen appliance from the Novell site. I chose Filr 1.1 as my test appliance because I want to test Filr.
  2. Unarchive the download. You should have a folder with a raw disk image and a xenconfig file. My Filr disk image is 21+ GB in size once it is expanded. The xenconfig file is only 179 bytes.
  3. Open your terminal application of choice and move into that newly created appliance folder.
  4. Grab xva.py and drop it into your appliance folder. I used curl http://www-archive.xenproject.org/files/xva/xva.py > xva.py to just grab it directly from the site. I have also made a local copy so that I have it for the future.
  5. Now is the fun part. Make sure you have enough free disk space to handle making a copy of the disk image. Also, make sure that xva.py is within that appliance folder. It will just make things easier.
  6. Next I ran the following: python xva.py -c Filr.x86_64-1.1.0.653.xenconfig -f Filr.x86_64-1.1.0.653.xva which will inspect the image and then output the whole thing as an XVA for import into XenServer. The xenconfig file contains the name of the disk image and other parameters needed, so you don’t need to include those.
  7. Now you wait.

When it is complete you will have a new XVA file that you can import through XenCenter into your XenServer infrastructure. Logging into the appliance later will allow you to install the XenServer Tools.

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Business Technology

Micro Focus Purchasing The Attachmate Group

Attachmate Group

Reuters has Micro Focus to buy The Attachmate Group in all-share deal on their site this morning, and it will be interesting to see how the deal pans out. The hope right now is that it will close in early November 2014, which is when I will be in Salt Lake City for BrainShare 2014, so I am hoping that some more information about tentative plans for the future will be revealed then.

The Attachmate Group, Inc. is the privately held parent company for Novell, SUSE, Attachmate, and NetIQ. Three of the four of those companies currently have products in-use on campus at Martin Luther College. I’ll have more to say on this in the future as more information comes out.

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Business Technology

Dark IT Continued

Rob England was kind enough to post a response to my Dark IT post. It is a good look at a major part of the problem:

Dark IT is not entirely the IT department’s fault. Nothing an IT department does unilaterally is going to fix the problem. If we are trying to fix Dark IT alone, we’ll continue to be on a hiding for nothing. It is essential that the organisation (not the IT department) puts in place policies and controls over the use of information and technology in order to protect itself, and that it empowers the IT department to be the agency to monitor and effect those policies and controls.

That is a great thing to emphasize. There is a lot of “blame” to be tossed around at any one time.

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Business Technology

Dark IT

Within any organization you have individuals bringing in IT resources from the outside. This is not always a bad thing, but I have found that it is the root cause of many individual problems for individual users. I’m not going to talk about the problems that unsupported technology can cause within an organization. That’s boring and it has been rehashed by too many people.

The better topic is this: If you have a proliferation of Dark IT (unsupported technology brought in by another individual or department), why is that happening? What is or is not happening that is causing these people or departments to look outside of IT to find solutions for their problems?

Every time this happens, it is an opportunity to look inward at your department to make things better.

Nate Beran gets to the heart of the matter with IT And The Business Are Indistinguishable and I am not going to reproduce any of it here because it is so short. Technology and computing has weaseled its way into every nook and cranny of virtually every organization that the traditional way of thinking of IT as a separate entity doling out technology to everyone else isn’t going to cut it anymore.

Things change. Needs change. Department change. Dark IT can be a symptom of the larger problem of IT being pushed out either consciously or subconsciously and it is time to sit down with people and figure out what needs to be done. It is not so much that your job is on the line (even though it might be), but that in order to better serve the people around you, you need to get working on mending fences.

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Business Life Technology

Choosing Your Tools Again

I forgot one huge thing, at least for me, when I am looking at tools: how they look.

It is completely and totally superfluous to an extent, but I won’t deny that how a tool looks (thinking of software mainly, but the same goes for hardware) does have an effect on how much I enjoy using the tool which generally affects how I feel about it overall.

A tool that looks terrible is less likely to have me coming back to use it in the future. For a CLI tool, the better the interface I am using, the more likely I am to continue to use it.

This is one of the reasons I continue to use Apple OS X and iOS instead of moving onto something else … they look and feel better. To me. This is entirely subjective, but it is still a quality I use to judge a tool by.

If you have a tool, and a website for that tool, but do not show off the user interface there is a good chance I am going to just pass on by for something else. Have a demo I can play with? Even better. Do you take real pride in your interface (both software and hardware)? That’s going to get my just that little bit more excited about looking at your tool.

Any tool still needs to ultimately get the job done, but if it can get the job done and look good doing it … then all the better. If it can get the job done, look good doing it, and then also be easy to use … I’m getting ahead of myself here. I’m going to try to not get greedy.

Image Credit: https://flic.kr/p/divHjN