Hard&Soft experiments

Warning: all operations are carried out only with the first two RAID partitions, the third partition is not changed

Due to the fact that the standard update is a XenServer installation of the new XenServer with virtual machines preservation, with the loss of all the changes that were made manually on the server (installed software, changing / adding settings through the console, etc.), the update is the new XenServer installation and connection of the old virtual machines.

Based on: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX120962

1. Backup all VM, manually:

   xe vm-export vm=vm_name filename=backup_fiule_name compress=true
   ...
   xe pool-dump-database file-name=dump_name.dump
   

   or with XENBack

2. VM metadata export

   xe vm-export metadata=true --multiple filename=VMEXPORT

   Warning: store all files VMEXPORT… to another computer/data store/etc

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Compiled from: CodeAddict’s Blog and http://pastebin.com/buBHcfxU

First: Install XenServer on first disk (/dev/sda) and NOT configure any local storage.
/dev/sda should contain three partitions, verify this with:

sgdisk -p /dev/sda

In some cases XenServer doesn’t create third partition, i.e. result of this command has only two partitions and looks like:

Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 8388641 4.0 GiB 0700
2 8390656 16777249 4.0 GiB 0700

In this case you need to create third partition manually:

sgdisk --new=3:16779264:DISK_SIZE-34 /dev/sda
sgdisk --typecode=3:fd00

The second partition is used for backups during a XenServer upgrade. This partition won’t used in my XenServer upgrade method.
Now we are going to use /dev/sdb as the mirror disk. First clear the partition table.

sgdisk --zap-all /dev/sdb

and install a GPT table on it

sgdisk --mbrtogpt --clear /dev/sdb

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