I rebuilt my XenServer slave tonight after it didn’t come back up properly last week after a power failure where I decided to ride it out on my UPS and not properly shutdown a few of my systems. The only system that had issues was this XenServer slave and since it wasn’t running my important VM’s at the time I decided to perform some more important non-computer related projects until tonight. Really the only thing that prompted me tonight to do this was I wanted to install Fedora 24 Server on a VM and I recalled I needed to get this XenServer hosts up and running.
Well the thing was it didn’t recognize and of my NIC’s built into my motherboard though they were enabled and showing properly in the bios. After several restarts and insuring cabling was correct I ended up having to remove power completely and power the system up, reset the bios and then reconfigure my bios settings to get the onboard NIC’s recognized finally.
Things were so corrupted with XenServer that even after that the onboard NIC’s weren’t recognized so I decided to reinstall since the VM’s are all on my NAS that I run FreeNAS on anyway and not local to the XenServer host. Had I needed I could have always run the VM’s on the master XenServer host.
Anyhow I reinstalled, XenServer 6.5 and tried to add it to the existing pool but it wouldn’t let me join the pool until I was patched up properly plus I still needed to destroy the old XnServer remnant name.
I tried destroying the old XenServer name out of the shared pool but couldn’t since the VM’s that were running on that hosts were still in a quasi running state. I found this article “http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX126382” and followed that to shutdown the VM’s:
- xe host-list
- xe vm-list resident-on=<UUID of XenServer host I wish to take out of pool>
- xe vm-reset-powerstate uuid=<UUID of VM’s still on powered on state on above host>
- Went to XenCenter -> Right-Clicked-> Destroy -> Remove failed XenServer host
In XenCenter I then went to Tools -> Install Update -> Showed patch that was installed in Master but not on newly installed system and just followed the GUI instructions and it pushed the patch from the Master to the slave and I was then able to join the freshly installed XenServer into the shared pool. I then configured the storage networks, placed the XenServer slave into maintenance mode and turned on multipathing. Restarted my other VM’s and they are now running on the XenServer slave and I’m back up and fully running in redundant mode again!
