 All right, we're gonna jump in a pool with XC PNG Zen server and We're gonna talk about resource pools why you'd want one or why you don't need one and a couple little details about it Now a lot of people ask about high availability and high availability comes from setting up your Zen server in a resource pool And a resource pool can be defined as two or more servers high availabilities though starts at three servers Officially and I'm gonna just cover this real quick I have not tested but I am aware of HA lizard Which is some interesting different way to create HA with just simply two servers and it's kind of any project I'm aware of it. I've read about it. I've not really dug into all the details of how it works And I certainly haven't tested it So just leaving it out there because a few people always ask if I've heard of this I'm very aware and most everything I am going to cover covers both Citrix and XC PNG server because for the most part they're very similar and this is December of 2018. So this is this is going to be applying to either one whichever system you are using I personally am using XC PNG server as my preferred Zen server system So real quick requirements for a resource pool a resource pool is a homogeneous or heterogeneous with restrictions Aggregate of one or more Zen server hosts with the maximum up to 64 So that's the most pool most you want in a pool, but I think there's ways you can go beyond that I don't quote me on it, but 64 servers is certainly plenty of servers a couple pre-requisites before you join a resource pool is You can't be a member of another resource pool. It doesn't have any currently configured share storage There's no running or suspended VMs on the Zen server which is joining and there's no active operations VM and product such as a shutdown. So they all have to be Just turn them all off. That's just better. So no running VMs You don't want any of that because you're just going to create Issues for yourself. The time has to be the same amount because they use time synchronization to make sure that everything's in check Its IP management address is static and that is important too Or if you have a appropriate DHCP server handing out static leases, so you know nothing changes That's important too when you're joining me to the Zen server Now let's talk a little bit about just how the hosts are set up So if you have a Zen server host and I'll leave links to all this If you have a Zen server host set up your normal setup looks like this So Zen server host host resources local storage Your iso storage and your direct attached storage So if you're running legacy standalone Zen server, this is common works perfectly fine And even if each of your servers is an individual Zen server hosts and not part of a shared pool things like zen motion Work perfectly fine But when you use Zen motion on a single individual zen host It has to copy the entirety of the VM because the shared Storage is not being configured between the two devices So it has to copy the entirety of the VM even if it's running so you can do it live and move it over to the other host This is Perfectly acceptable. And if you're only running zen servers in local storage, you may not even need to put them in a resource pool The resource pool becomes really advantageous when you do have shared storage Because if you want to take a VM running and the VM is stored on the shared storage the VM can just almost Very quickly jump between each one of the zen server hosts or an ha can be uh Quickly started back up on the other zen server hosts. So it can just keep running This is where the ha and the zen server hosts become a big advantage to have a pool The other advantage of the pool is when you set up individual zen server hosts You can back up your VMs, but you always have to remember you also have to back up that VM metadata That is running on the zen server hosts all the Settings and network settings and all the little details that are within that host about the VM that's running on there So the VM can be protected with your backups or if you export as an xva file All that data comes with it so you can put it on another host But all that data is just sitting right here now. Hopefully you built your zen server Not with one single drive at least a mirror for the boot. So you're you know mitigating some of the risk or reducing the risk, but with a Zen server pool all that metadata is shared between all the hosts now One host gets elected as master and if you turn this on for an ha setup when you have three or more They will automatically elect a master if the master goes down if it's not set up for ha and a master goes down You have so much time to either force one of the other ones to become master Or get the master back up and running now because it's synchronizing that VM metadata storage All these have knowledge of all the VMs So as you update or have to restart a host you're not losing that metadata or potentially taking that metadata offline because they're all in sync Once again, that's also why time syncing matters too and making sure they all have the right Time sync for that. So let's talk about this in practice now So here is my system and we only have two servers. So we're going to go over here to the pools Now if you have Zen server running individually, it always gives the name of the pool You the name of the server now, this is because each server even if it's by itself It's technically in its own pool. It's just lonely. It's by it's all set up by itself If you have zen servers multiple ones, then you want to put them in a pool Well, that's when you can name the pool you can always name the pool separate But you can name the pool at that point and then you have all the different hosts that belong to that pool Now joining your hosts the pool is really easy I don't have an extra one at the moment to show you how to join it But you literally just join a host resource pool that part is documented. It's easy And I'll leave you the zen orchestra. It really straightforwarded you you can just go ahead and Set all the little details can all be configured in there for this includes the aj setup if you want it there But joining things into the pool pretty straightforward pretty easy. That's actually the least complicated part of this Now, please know when you eject something from a pool, it'll clean out that zen server to all the metadata gets wiped that way It can be Ready to be joined to another pool or do whatever you want with it Another important part about the pool is they need to be Similar or the same as the best server with the same configurations as in similar processors and things like that If you have an amd server and a intel server, you're going to have a headache because that you can't just pass things between them Because you have different processor types So you really want the processors to have the same features even if they're not the exact same processor They're at least of the same generation with the same feature sets. That's important but the most ideal situation is when you just have a identical server sets and makes your life a whole lot easier because then passing between your doesn't have any Gotchas that you may have run into this is how our servers are set up And the servers maintain their individuality. They maintain their local storage. So if we go over to our storage Here's a zen center for local storage center for two local storage Then we go over to the pool and we call the pool the puddle because we only have two servers and that's adequate for me So I'm not really worried about ha because we can start the servers up fairly quickly Actually really fast. It takes no time at all. So if a server's a fail where a tech company We would realize it and go. Hey look at failed and we'd start it back up I don't have anything set to be automated on purpose because we use a lot of resource testing And there's reasons I don't feel like doing it right now for clients It's a different story when you want to set up ha Because you want things to be very automated and smooth in a client environment Ours is a very hands-on slash lab slash our environment Now one thing to note here is you have all this redundancy here Then we have the shared storage over here When you build these you have to really think about what your shared storage setup is And you have to make sure it's really bulletproof and because the shared storage becomes a single point of failure for all of these This is where enterprise solutions like true nas come in and true nas for example And I've reviewed this before you can find it on my channel has redundant motherboards in it And this is when you get into enterprise nas storage. You'll look at as well. Well, it's called not really nas storage It's a san at that point. You'll have a whole storage area network with redundancies there that way That doesn't become your next single point of failure Because if you do ha you need to have that vm on the shared storage pool for it to easily go between hosts very quickly And that's what we're going to cover here So here's my puddle and here is the storages So dozer is my shared NFS storage and adding a shared storage is easy It doesn't really matter where you start once you have the pool created whenever you Go to the storage and you add a storage. We're going to go over here to the pool and we're going to go here to Add a storage repository it has me picking here, but if it's a shared storage type It will automatically add that to both of them. So that's Kind of an automated feature it may look like you're adding a storage to one But because they're part of a resource pool as long as it's a shared storage type not a local storage type It'll add it to both automatically when you add the storage And if you already have the storage set up as an NFS share and you add others to the pool They all get that automatically there's individual ways when you're here in the storage though And I've never tried it because it doesn't seem like a good idea like over your storages dozer Yeah, you can connect to all hosts or disconnect from all hosts as an option So I know there's some if the host had a problem we could reconnect or disconnect it I really haven't had an issue to do that but it is in there This shows you where you can individually connect them Um, I guess if there's some reason it's rebooting or something And maybe you want to force connect it you can do that It won't let you forget the storage pool for that one because they're all part of the pool here Now back over to storage. Here's those who's enter for local storage Now if things are stored in local store, I can still do this end motion between them But it goes just like it does individual hosts where it has to transfer the entire to the vm So look at the vms and I threw this w9 base here The disc is on dozer. So it's on the shared storage and we're going to show you how this works So right now this is sitting on center for two And we're going to move it to the center for one and we're going to do this all in real time not going to fast forward anything So we'll go here to migrate So it's on center for two. We're going to put it on center for one. I've only got one other server So there's not a lot of options here and we're going to hit okay And migration has begun So there's a little migration thing I'm going to go over back over here to my vms because I want to see what the ap address this is Or I'll log into it actually We'll run htop. I don't know just so it's doing a thing. So it's transferring and moving And oh 85 90 Um 100 percent. All right. Oh, this is a cleanup part where it's got to finish the migration done You kind of get the idea how quickly now it's on center for not center for two That's the nice thing one that things are in a pool and on shared storage because We didn't have to pass. Let me go back to the council here We didn't have to pass the Hard drive around we only passed the vm. It's memory state back and forth So this machine is using not a lot of ram What do we have assigned to it here? Was it four gigs four gigs of ram? So we just had to move four gigs of ram and the contents of that live running memory And the processor configuration and things like that in the network interface Right on over to the other server. So it doesn't take long now it first builds a Tunnel between the two essentially it syncs the data between the two and then it says it's ready And that's kind of why there's like a Uh gets to 100 to say we got it all moved over here and it synchronizes any differential changes and boom We are over there if you have a bigger machine that has eight gigs ram like this window server right here Our little evaluation server Yes, I know there's a password in it. Who cares if you have the password to my evaluation server I'm not that worried about it We do that when we're setting these things up this will this will be changed again shortly So by the time this video is published actually this server will be destroyed. It's just an evaluation for a test we're doing right now Anyways, I'm not going to get too off topic on that, but let's migrate this one So this one's sitting on zennifer, which means it'll have the option to migrate to zennifer 2 So go ahead and okay migrate over bigger server Windows obviously just is doing more stuff than idling linux box, but you can see just as fast Maybe slightly slower because it's a little bit more ram that servers Migrating right on over now This is this is where the advantages of the pool are and this is where you know once you have these servers You can just shuffle them around now This is great for doing updates especially because if they're all on the shared storage everything's running on your Shared storage, which like I said it still becomes a single point of failure So make sure your storage option is really solid or a multi path with Different options like ice cozy multi path or redundant servers Anyways, I'm not going to get in that detail right now, but it's important that you build a solid shared storage So it's not a single point of failure, but you can see if you have to do some updates how Moving all the servers and of course if we did it like this And did a mass migration you could mass migrate them all to one server or migrate them all the other way So you could update the server during business hours during production and not have a big deal For doing it. So it's it's a good advantage to have them set up in there Between the shared metadata and the shared storage and being able to pass things around But it's not Necessary if you just want to do things like I just want two machines running And I want to be able to pass the VMs between them And I don't mind dealing with the slower speed of passing them along that way So definitely pretty cool. I'll leave links to everything I talked about here in the video and we're done And that a couple whatever time it was I was talking here. So Hopefully this gives you better understanding of the shared resource pools what they are whether or not you really need them The last thing I will mention is it does cover as well the Networking aspect of it. So all the network becomes the same for both of them when you're doing this That makes it really easy because it manages the networking for you because it acts them as one big server in here All right, thanks Thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video Go ahead and hit the thumbs up if you want to see more content from my channel Go ahead and hit subscribe and the bell icon and hopefully youtube will send you a notice If you're interested in contracting launch systems for any type of it services work or consulting work Go ahead and head over to laurance systems.com and fill out our contact and get in touch with us If you would like to help the channel out in other ways You can use our affiliate links below in the description or we have a link directly to our launch systems page We have a list of different affiliate offers And it's very appreciated if you use any of those for signing up any of the services and many of them Offer you discounts if you want to head over to our forums There'll be a link in the description for our forums Wherever they may be because we've been looking at different forum platforms, but they'll always be relevantly linked right there All right, once again, thanks Leave some feedback and comments below on this video if you loved it if you hated it I try to reply to everyone the people who hate and the people who love them So thank you very much and see you next time