misc. questions

[Jay West]

Mark wrote...
> You're having success with Xenserver 6.1? That's good news. I wonder why
XCP 1.6 is unable to boot FreeBSD if there's an emulated DVDROM? :(

Yes. Stock install 64bit 9.1-R as HVM, recompile kernel using supplied
XENHVM config file. Then there's a few things to tweak before rebooting, one
is fstab because of the different naming convention for disk devices or you
choke on reboot after install (you can still do it after by entering correct
device in boot string). The other is the cd drive, you have to remove the cd
device (see http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX132411). There may be
another step I'm forgetting, but that's the basic gist. Oh, and fix rc.conf
to use the xen (xn0) network device. We are still having one really nagging
issue - timekeeping. The clocks are way off and fluctuate wildly. FreeBSD is
selecting the clock source (from several possibilities) that already has the
highest stability rating, so I haven't tried setting the sysctl to use a
different clock source. I see no way to fix this and it's pretty crippling
in my environment anyways. Anyone have a fix for that?

>If you're using pf, you will certainly need to set net.inet.tcp.tso=0
By pf I assume you mean the freebsd firewall? We don't use that, all the
firewall stuff is via a frontend pfsense install (non-vm), so I assume the
above setting isn't required?

>As far as the other offloading -- I put this on my NICs:
>ifconfig_xn0="(your stuff here) -txcsum -rxcsum -lro -tso"
Ah, good to know. Thanks!

>We usually install the same version on the VM and rsync the entire OS over.
Then replace the kernel with the XENHVM one, do a bit of tweaking (rc.conf,
pf.conf, fstab), and move on.
The "best" way I found to do this (WRT speed & functionality) was to just
use "dump" on the old machine, create the vm, then use "restore". That being
said, I can understand the commercial citrix xenserver being slow to
implement "XenConvert" on freebsd... but I'm surprised that the open source
Xen doesn't have a tool that turns a bare metal freebsd install into an
OVF/VDI file. Surely someone is working on this. Fortunately, all our
freebsd boxes are now virtualized, but I'm sure others are wanting
"XenConvert" to work on FreeBSD.

Thanks a ton for the input folks!

Jay