Xpenlogy - Xenserver 6.5 working - help with passthrough

[vetvetter]

Hardware:

HP N54L microserver

(4) 3tb sata drives(in machine)

(1) USB drive(xenserver is installed to this)

 

Virtulization/Hypervisor:

Xenserver 6.5

 

Software:

Xpenoboot 5.1-5022.2

Xpenology 5.1 – 5022

Modded Bios

Modded - qemu-dm-wrapper – got a new one from John McGuigan for xenserver 6.5 (allows the nic card to show as an e1000 nic so xpenoboot will pick it up) -

 

viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3718&p=22250

 

 

 

I don’t know why I aways decide to go a little against the grain… Might be that I already had another Xenserver up and running already…. I perfer Xenserver just because it is a very mature hypervisor, and a person can do what they want with it and not be forced into buying additional functions. Looking around I didn’t see much on Xenserver working with Xpenology. I see a lot of how to’s with ESXI, Hyper-V, etc….

 

However I was able to Xpenology to work OK, unfortunately I ran into some additional unforeseen issues. I was attempting to do PCI pass-through for SATA so that Xpenology would see the separate disks to create a larger raid. I found out that while the Turion II n54l processor does support virtualization it does not support IOMMU which I am reading is needed for PCI pass-through to work inside of xenserver. If my processor supported IOMMU I think I would be home free and this would be a null issue, but I know there a a bunch of N54L, N40L, and N36L's out there which this could be useful to....

 

I was working through a few work arounds and found two options that seemed like they might work, but ran into a few roadblocks.

 

 

The first one is to basically fool xenserver into seeing the sata disks(sdb,sdc,sdd,sde) as removable disks. This one seems like the most viable option, but I could use some help……

 

http://techblog.conglomer.net/sata-dire ... xenserver/

 

I made the edits, and they showed up perfectly as SCSI disks as was intended. I was able to attach 2 of the sata disks inside of the xencenter gui perfectly, and they showed as two seperate usable disks inside of synology. The roadblock I ran into was that because I can't install xentools I was only able to attach 2 disks per GUI default.

 

I thought to myself no problem.... I will just manually attach via a VDB through command line. Well.... that didn't work so hot and I get this message "Error: Empty VBDs can only be made for type=CD". I hunted around a bit and found what I think is the xencode here which shows the message where I am getting with what I think is the parameters. I'm not 100% sure why they are showing up “empty”. This happens even if I attach them, add something inside of synology to them(so they aren't "empty"), detach, then try to reattach through CLI.

 

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/s ... clnk&gl=us

 

 

The second way which I haven't tried since it seems like a huge mess/pain from what I am reading is "raw device mapping". I stumbled upon it when someone was talking about it for ESXI as a way to attach disks, so I did a little digging if I could do it in xenserver. Didn't find much, but what I found seemed pretty ugly:

 

https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/topic/ ... pms/page-2

 

 

So at this point I guess I have two options. Keep trying to chase down figuring out how to force additional disks through CLI inside of xenserver. Or scrap the whole idea of running this through xenserver and just install it bare metal.

 

 

I put a LOT of work/research into getting this to where I am right now, I thought maybe you might be of some assistance? Technically I am there, however I just can only add so many disks. I am like so close..... I just need a little help getting unstuck to add some more!…… I’m hoping someone might be able to offer some assistance to get this little box up and running right!

 

Thanks