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Wednesday 15 September 2010

XenServer CLI - Commands

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Since there is so many command within XenServer sometimes its hard to remember which command you require. This is just a list of regular commands that I use but please feel free to point out your favourite commands.

To find anything with the word "Server1" in messages logs. Obviously change the word to what you require but if you'r having a problem with a server named Server1 of instances you can enter the command below to filter out any information with Server1 in the logs.

grep Server1 /var/log/messages

To list your interfaces so you can identify the right UUID for your network device.

xe pif-list

To list full device details for the network device. TIP: once you have the UUID's of all of your interfaces simply enter the first couple of characters of the UUID interface and then press tab to fully populate the UUID.

xe pif-param-list uuid=(UUID of pif)

In XenServer 5 FP 1 you have the option to use vSwiches instead of the traditional bridging technology, the default install of XenServer does not have this enabled so you will have to run the following command to enable it. NOTE: you have to restart your XenServer after you have entered this command.

xe-switch-network-backend openvswitch


With XenServer it recommended that turn off auto-negotiation, set duplex to Full, and speed to 1000 using the Command Line Interface (CLI). To do this first find the UUID of the storage interface using the following command.

xe pif-list

Next set the parameters of the physical interface (PIF) using the following commands.

xe pif-param-set uuid= other-config:ethtool-autoneg=”off”
xe pif-param-set uuid= other-config:ethtool-speed=1000
xe pif-param-set uuid= other-config:ethtool-duplex=”full”


Restart the XAPI service because it controls networking on the XenServer, an alternative option is to reboot the XenServer. If you are in a pool, the above changes must be done on each storage PIF of the XenServers.

With XenServer its sometimes necessary to restart the iSCSI service on a XenServer, to do so run the following command from the CLI

service open-iscsi restart

Some times in XenCenter you'll get a VM that's in a "halted" state and you cannot even perform a force shutdown/reboot and even a xe-toolstack-restart will not shutdown the VM. To run a force restart from a CLI command run the following commands.

xe vm-shutdown -u root vm-name=vm_name
xe vm-shutdown -u root vm-id=vm_UUID


NOTE: you can change the shutdown option to either boot or retart to change the function you want.

xe help –all|more Show a list of XenServer CLI commands
• xsconsole Runs up the XenServer text based console
• xe-toolstack-restart Restarts the XenServer management tools
• ls –l List files in a Directory
• less /var/log/dmesg Display Boot Messages from Linux
• xe host-dmesg Xen Hypervisor Boot messages
• tail –f /var/log/xensource.log Look at xapi messages as they happen
• tail –f /var/log/xensource.log | grep xxx Look at xapi messages only for vm uuid xxx
• tail –f [log name] > [target filename] Send output to a file for analysis later
• cat /etc/xensource-inventory Display XenSource Inventory info
• xen-bugtool –yes Build a status report when xapi is down
• xe-backup-metadata -d –u [uuid of SR] Back up Pool metadata for all VMs
• tcpdump –i [inf] –vvv –w [filename] Get a Packet trace from [inf]. E.g. Inf=eth0, xenbr0, vif2.0 etc.
• top List the top processes running in Dom0
• xentop List top Xen processes
• mpstat 5 Processor stats in Dom0
• vmstat 2 Virtual memory in Dom0
• netstat –s Networking statistics
• iostat -d 2 6 Storage traffic stats
• list_domains Lists VMs that are running
• fdisk –l List the disk partitions
• hdparm –t /dev/sda3 Device read times for sda3 (normally local SR)
• pvs Show local and remote LVHD SRs
• ll /dev/disks/by-id Look at disk partitions
• lvs List logical volumes (virtual disks)
• vgs List LVM volume groups
• cd /var/run/sr-mount Look at NFS SRs
• df -h Shows how much disk space you have left
• dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null iflag=direct bs=1M count=512 Read data performance from sdb.
• dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb oflag=direct bs=1M count=4096 Write performance on sdb. * Don’t use on disks with VMs on them!
• ifconfig Show info on NICs, virtual switches and vNICs
• brctl show Show info on virtual switches
• ethtool eth0 Info for NIC eth0
• mii-tool Info on NIC bonding
• iscsiadm -m discovery –type sendtargets –port 192.168.250.14 Discover iSCSI targets available to this server
• iscsiadm –m session Open iscsi sessions
• history Lists the history of commands you’ve used
• !136 Executes command #136 in the history
• history -w history-list.txt Writes the history info to a text file

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