At Propus, the company I work to, we’ve been using XenServer to virtualize most of our servers. This is great and practical, except for one little detail: the CLI administration tool, called xe, is a huge PITA to be used on a daily-basis. Also, there’s a GUI administration tool, called XenCenter, but only for Windows. Well, there are some GUIs to GNU/Linux, but those are either abandoned or are completely incapable of doing something useful.
So, I decided to write a simple script to ease some of the repetitive, mundane actions of administering Xen. It’s called xeh (as in XE Helper), and it’s publicly available at gitHub under GPLv2.
https://github.com/bcdonadio/xeh
As it was written in BASH in a single day (TODO: learn Python), there’s a lot to improve. I plan to update it as the use in the company grows and new features are requested or bugs are found. Eventually, I might write it again in other (safer, faster, better, real) language, but for now it’s fulfilling my needs.
The main features are the following:
- Remote administration
- Automatic SSH tunnel and VNC session creation
- Simplified object search interface
- Ability to use a predefined list of servers and credentials
- Good user input validation
- Human readable memory value input
- Consistent user interface
- Just take care with maybe some loose ends!