There doesn't seem to be any way to configure jumbo frames with XenServer 5.5, and I'm sure this is unsupported, but it can be done by hacking the XenServer 5.5 config files.

You will see something like this

We are going to add our MTU information there:

9212 is the MTU I chose, make sure you choose one that's appropriate for your network, and make sure to test it first.

This will only change the MTU on the bonded interfaces, I believe.

After installing webmin from the package manager, you will need to run

to generate the appropriate config files.

Solaris has an alternate version of locate, called slocate. updatedb is still called the same, just instead of locate, you would call slocate.

In order to do a graphical install (which lets you customize your LVM volumes) you just need to add the vnc option to the "OS Boot Parameters" when creating the VM. It should look like this:

Once you start up your VM, it will go through a short text based configuration wizard, configuring your NIC and such, after which it will prompt you to log in using VNC.

By default Urchin 5 seems to want to open reports in a new window. This can be a little annoying. To change this, we just need to update the javascript function that gets run when you click on the "View Report" link.

You should see the following code:

We're going to comment it out and add our own code:

After clearing our cache, the reports open in the same window.

In order to make XenServer 5.5 work with LACP, we need to modify the start up scripts

We will see the following:

We will change the mode from "balance-slb" to "802.3ad"

Don't forget to configure your switch for LACP.

The default install of NexentaStor's web interface is incredibly slow. I'm not sure why, but they limit it to a single thread, which doesn't work out that well when you have images and things like that that need to be loaded.

The way to up the number of threads is to edit the /var/lib/nza/prod.cfg from a shell. First start up Putty and ssh to the nexenta IP, and log in with the root password. If you have not already set up expert mode

Now we need to get into a shell.

Now lets edit the file

Find the line that says

and change it to something higher (the nexenta docs recommend setting it no higher then 10

Now we need to restart the NMS service for things to take effect

This tends to knock me off the ssh session, and I have to go and reconfigure the network interface from a terminal.

I installed XenServer 5, and then added some gigabit NICs, but the server wasn't seeing them. Turned out I needed to do the following from the server console:

This made the NICs show up in XenCenter.