Linux – Xen domU shared drive alternative to NFS

I eventually solved this by using the following advice and settings from the open-iscsi documentation:

8.2 iSCSI settings for iSCSI root
---------------------------------

When accessing the root parition directly through a iSCSI disk, the
iSCSI timers should be set so that iSCSI layer has several chances to try to
re-establish a session and so that commands are not quickly requeued to
the SCSI layer. Basically you want the opposite of when using dm-multipath.

For this setup, you can turn off iSCSI pings by setting:

node.conn[0].timeo.noop_out_interval = 0
node.conn[0].timeo.noop_out_timeout = 0

And you can turn the replacement_timer to a very long value:

node.session.timeo.replacement_timeout = 86400

After setting up the connection to each LUN as described above, the failover works like a charm, even if it takes several minutes to happen.

Your questions is a little unclear as to what kind of stats you are hoping to collect from the dom0, but I think what you are looking for is an understanding of how your existing hardware resources are allocated.

We're having great success using libvirt's Python bindings to get this information. Here's a Python script snippet that illustrates the idea:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import libvirt

def main(options,args):
    hypervisors = sys.argv[1:]

    print "%16s%18s%18s%18s" % ("dom0 IP", "Free Memory (MB)", "Disk Used (GB)", "Disk Free (GB)")
    for ip in hypervisors:
        # this assumes "remote" connection to libvirtd using TCP
        url = "xen+tcp://%s" % (ip)

        conn = libvirt.open(url)
        # you may want to do more error handling here
        if conn == None:
            continue

        mem = conn.getFreeMemory() / 1048576 #convert bytes -> megabytes
        pool = conn.storagePoolLookupByName('vol0')
        # a refresh() is necessary because libvirtd's internal information isn't
        # always in sync with the host.
        pool.refresh(0)
        disk_info = pool.info()
        disk_used = disk_info[2] / 1073741824 #convert bytes -> gigabytes
        disk_free = disk_info[3] / 1073741824 #convert bytes -> gigabytes
        print "%16s%18d%18s%18d" % (ip, mem, disk_used, disk_free)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    sys.exit(main(options,args))