Xena Knowledge Base

Resource Reservation

This page explains how chassis resources are reserved.

Chassis Resources

A “chassis resource” can be either the chassis itself, a testmodule on the chassis or a testport on a module.

The Xena Xena testers support multiple simultaneous connections from any mixture of Xena clients, such as the XenaManager, scripting clients, XenaManager2544, etc. As soon as a client has successfully established a connection to the chassis any chassis resource can be inspected. But in order to change the resource configuration the resource must first be reserved by the client.

Reservation Mechanism 

Only one client can reserve a particular resource at a time. The reservation will be active even if the client is disconnected. If the client re-connects at a later time and identifies itself with the same username any such “left-over” reservations will automatically be transferred to the new connection.

The reservation belongs to a combination of the connection ID in the chassis and the specified username. The username is simply used as a tag for the reserved resource, and the chassis have no notion of actual ‘user accounts’. Multiple connections could use the same name, but any resource will only be reserved to one connection at a time.

The default username for the XenaManager is the Windows username for the current user. You can change the username for XenaManager in the Options menu. The username can contain up to 8 characters.

 

Reserving a Resource

To reserve a resource you select the resource in the treeview and click the button in the ribbon menu. Alternatively you can right-click the resource and select the equivalent menu item.

Once you have reserved the resource all configuration options for that resource will now be enabled.

You can quickly reserve all ports in your current testbed by pressing the Reserve Used Ports button located just below the testbed selector.

Releasing a Resource

To release any resource reserved by yourself you select the resource in the treeview and click the Release Resource button in the ribbon menu or right-click the resource and select the equivalent menu item.

Relinquish Resource

To forcibly take away a resource from another user you can select the Relinquish Resource option instead. You will be prompted to confirm this action before it is executed.

chassissessions.png

Before relinquishing resources reserved by another user it may be a good idea to check if that user has an active connection on the chassis. Otherwise you may quickly get rather unpopular among your co-workers.

You can check the active connections on a chassis by selecting the chassis in the Available Resources treeview and activating the Resource Properties tab. The active connection are listed at the bottom of chassis properties panel.

 

Handling Multiple Resources

It is possible to operate on multiple resources in the treeview using the standard Windows [Shift-Click] or [Ctrl-Click] mouse operations.

Reservation Hierarchy

Reservations are hierarchical exclusive which means that if user Albert has reserved a given testmodule then user Bertha will be prevented from reserving any port on that module. The same applies to chassis reservations. However user Albert does not reserve the ports on the testmodule by reserving the testmodule itself.

In general you do not need to reserve modules and chassis to perform normal traffic generation operations. You should only reserve ports. Reserving modules and chassis are only necessary when performing system maintenance, software upgrades or changing the port types on certain modules.