Citrix
Xenserver is a beautiful open source (from 6.2 edition and later)
hypervisor that tries to grab as much as possible market share on
virtualization/cloud world. It carries many years of development efforts
by Citrix, many well established implementations and a broad support
community.
XenMotion, High Availability and all the great features of Xenserver are available on the licensed and unlicensed versions of the hypervisor. The licensed version includes automated patches and updates through XenCenter console and 24×7 Citrix Technical Support. On the unlicensed version, the administrator should apply the xenserver patches by himself through an ssh console. XenCenter still notifies the availability of new patches.
So, on XenCenter when you goto Tools – Install Updates, you get grayed out options like this
So, first of all we should download the new patches from Citrix
webserver, XenCenter will help you to do so. Then unzip the contents of
the downloaded files and secure ftp them on XenServer.
I use filezilla to sftp the updates to XenServer in binary transfer
mode and upload them to /var/tmp directory. Then ssh to XenServer (I use
putty utility to do so but you can use anything you are comfortable
with). Login as root and run the following command
this command produces a uuid alphanumeric string. Copy it to the clipboard and on XenCenter notice the yellow down icons that appear, indicating that a hotfix or update exists but has not been applied.
Run
pasting the uuid string. You may verify the applied patches by running
If the update has been successful, the hosts field should contain the uuids of all the hosts in the pool. Finally, run
to reload the toolstack on all hosts, you may loose the connection if you run it on Pool Master.
Now, your XenServer is patched!
XenMotion, High Availability and all the great features of Xenserver are available on the licensed and unlicensed versions of the hypervisor. The licensed version includes automated patches and updates through XenCenter console and 24×7 Citrix Technical Support. On the unlicensed version, the administrator should apply the xenserver patches by himself through an ssh console. XenCenter still notifies the availability of new patches.
So, on XenCenter when you goto Tools – Install Updates, you get grayed out options like this
XenCenter Upadtes Installation
Ftp the updates to XenServer
xe patch-upload file-name=/var/tmp/this command produces a uuid alphanumeric string. Copy it to the clipboard and on XenCenter notice the yellow down icons that appear, indicating that a hotfix or update exists but has not been applied.
XenCenter warning icon
xe patch-pool-apply uuid=pasting the uuid string. You may verify the applied patches by running
xe patch-list
Verifying patches
xe-toolstack-restartto reload the toolstack on all hosts, you may loose the connection if you run it on Pool Master.
Applying Patches
