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Copyright © 2007 XenSource, Inc. Xen®, XenSource™, XenEnterprise™, XenServer™, XenExpress™, XenCenter™ and logos are either registered trademarks or trademarks of XenSource, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company or product names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners. Published October 2007 Table of Contents
Table of Contents XenSource presents its customers with support offerings that are designed to assist during all stages of product usage:
These programs are offered on an annual basis. They are described in the following sections. This offering enables you to log in to the Support Services system and file Support Cases. A Technical Support Engineer will be assigned to your case and you will be notified of any activity via email during the resolution process To file a Support Case: Go to http://www.xensource.com/support/, log in with your email address and password, and click on Submit. XenSource Base Support initial response time is as follows:
XenSource Base Support business days are Mon-Fri at the following hours:
This offering includes the Base Support offering, and additionally enables you to place a phone call to XenSource Support to file Support Cases, and to obtain real time assistance on your XenSource product. A Technical Support Engineer will be assigned to your case and you will be notified of any activity via email during the resolution process, and contacted by phone if necessary to make progress on your issue. In addition, the Gold Support offering has enterprise class SLAs. To file a Support Case:
XenSource Gold Support initial response time is as follows:
XenSource Gold Support business days are Mon-Fri at the following hours:
Support Web Site: http://www.xensource.com/support Contact our sales staff by email at sales@xensource.com or contact any of our XenSource resellers. You can find contact information for a reseller near you at http://www.xensource.com/partners/Pages/solnpart.aspx Table of Contents When a technical issue with the product arises, and you create a Support Case through the XenSource Support website, the XenSource Technical Support team will promptly log your Support Case and assign your issue to the appropriate Technical Support Engineer. The following sections detail the life cycle of a Support Case and explain best practices, our processes and your options as the issue progresses. Below is listed the information we need from you to diagnose problems and quickly log your Support Case. Please gather the pertinent information before you contact XenSource Support. System, storage and/or network configuration diagrams and files are very helpful when troubleshooting problems with a XenSource product. Having these diagrams on file for easy upload to XenSource Support or running the appropriate commands on the devices to collect the configuration information can help accelerate the problem-solving process. If you experience trouble during installation of the XenServer Host software, installation logs are written to If you experience problems with a XenServer Host exiting abnormally or otherwise hanging or crashing, reboot and use the xe command host-bugreport-upload to collect the appropriate log files and system information and upload them to the XenSource Support ftp site. Please refer to the xe CLI reference in the XenServer Adminstrator's Guide for the specific syntax. If it is physical hardware that is crashing, any log files from the hardware vendor can be helpful as well. Refer to the vendor documentation for the names and locations of any pertinent log files. If you experience problems with a Virtual Machine exiting abnormally or otherwise hanging or crashing, please refer to the section titled "VM crashes" in the XenServer Virtual Machine Installation Guide for details. Purchasers of XenSource products are provided with access to the XenSource Support website. This website provides resources and services for members, including full product documentation, technical papers, access to the Knowledge Base, and participation in discussion forums XenSource continually updates the XenSource Support site with new technical information, workarounds, and other information relevant to the operation of XenSource products. We encourage you to search the XenSource Support web site for answers to your questions before submitting a Support Case. All customers have unlimited access to web-based technical documentation for all XenSource products at http://www.xensource.com/support/. This information includes product documentation and release notes for all currently released XenSource products. You can browse or search the XenSource Knowledge Base for troubleshooting information for all released XenSource products at http://kb.xensource.com/ Share information and experiences with other users of XenSource products by registering and participating in the Customer Forums at http://forums.xensource.com/ If you have an active Support agreement, you can file a Support Case on our Support web site. To create an online Support Case, go to http://www.xensource.com/support/, log in with your email address and password, and click on Submit. You will see a page that looks like this:  Use the information you gathered (as described in Section 2.1, “Collecting Information”) to fill out the necessary fields, provide a detailed problem description, and attach any/all configuration, log and core files as appropriate. When ready, click the button. NoteImportant note: When you file a Support Case, you choose an initial severity based on your best judgement, but XenSource Support will review these severities and possibly change them. See Section 2.3.1, “Understanding Severities”. After you fill out the Support Case form, your request is assigned a Support Case number. The Support Case number is confirmed with you on-screen and a computer-generated email message acknowledging receipt of your Support Case will be sent within one (1) hour. Please use this Support Case number when communicating with XenSource about the issue. If you have a Gold Support Account, you can also file a Support Case by calling the XenSource Gold Support Line. Initial response times by the Technical Support Engineer will follow the guidelines described later in this document. Support Case severity is a measure of the relative impact of an issue on your systems or business. Accurately defining the severity of your issue ensures a timely response and helps us to understand the nature of your problem. NoteWhen you file a Support Case, you choose an initial severity based on your best judgement, but XenSource Support will review these severities and possibly change them. The severity of the problem determines the speed of our response. Following are the target time commitments for providing the initial response. Severities
A specific Technical Support Engineer is assigned to your Support Case and owns your problem until we mutually agree the Support Case can be closed. The Technical Support Engineer will contact you through the Customer Center web site, and you will be notified of any activity in the Support Case via email during the resolution process. Your responsibility is to have the appropriate people and resources available to work with the Technical Support Engineer during the service hours defined in your support agreement. For Base Support, it is potentially beneficial to include a contact phone number in your Support Case in case it becomes expedient for the Technical Support Engineer to contact you directly by phone. For Gold Support, direct phone contact is included in the support offering. A XenSource Technical Support Engineer works with you to try to resolve the issue, taking whatever steps are necessary to first fully diagnose the problem and then to find a solution. This may involve:
Occasionally, we may reassign a Support Case from one Technical Support Engineer to another due to differences in time zones or if different product expertise is required. We will inform you if we need to reassign your Support Case. You can view the status of your Support Case and annotate it via the Support web site.  If you have a Gold Support Account, you can also contact the XenSource Gold Support Line to check on the status of your Support Case. We will make any and all efforts to resolve your problem. Our objective is to find a configuration change, code change or workaround that will provide you with a satisfactory solution and meet your business requirements. In more complex or intractable cases, we will work with you to escalate the issue and establish an action plan. The details of how to escalate an issue and what actions XenSource Support will take can be found in the next section. You can escalate Support Cases at any time by requesting an escalation through the Support Case on the XenSource Support web site, by typing "please escalate" in the Submit a Message field. If you have a Gold Support Account, you can also contact the XenSource Gold Support Line to request an escalation. The issue is escalated to the Technical Support management team. The Support Manager will formulate an action plan to address the issue. A Support Case is typically closed when you confirm that a resolution is reached or if you do not update your Support Case in the Support web site over a seven day period following the last notification of Support Case activity. If you do contact us after a case has been closed for this reason, we will be happy to reopen the Support Case and continue working towards a resolution. We may also close Support Cases if we cannot resolve, or choose not to resolve certain issues, with acknowledgement and agreement from you. The services we offer and the services we will offer in the future are based in a large part on feedback from you. In addition, your satisfaction with our services is the only way we measure our success. As such, we conduct customer satisfaction surveys that give you the opportunity to let us know how we are doing. After we close your Support Case, you will receive a notification via email asking for your feedback in an online survey on the following areas:
On a semi-annual basis, we will conduct a much more extensive survey to understand your satisfaction with the overall support experience. This will include areas like the ones in the transactional survey above, but it will also include issues such as:
These surveys will be conducted via an email invitation to fill out a web form. These surveys will always be accompanied by an invitation from XenSource to participate so you will know they are legitimate. If you are contacted for one of these surveys, please take a moment to respond. Table of Contents The following sections describe our support policies and explain how specific product versions are supported, compatibility between product releases, compatibility with third party software versions and support for custom code. XenSource Support will assist customers in problem analysis to determine whether or not the technical issue is related to third party hardware or software. In order to isolate the Error, we reserve the right to request that the third party hardware or software be removed. This will only be done where we have reason to believe the issue is related to the third party hardware or software. If XenSource Support cannot directly identify the root cause or it is reasonably suspected that the problem is related to the third party hardware or software, we will direct the customer to contact the third party vendor's support organization. We provide software releases to fix problems uncovered in our current products. If your problem relates to a software bug in a XenSource product as acknowledged by XenSource with a bug tracking number associated with a Support Case, our Technical Support Engineer will work with you to determine the appropriate release mechanism for a fix, based on the technical severity of the bug and the business impact it has on your organization. A patch or hotfix release is provided on an as-needed basis, for example when a bug or a set of bugs are causing a production system to be down for a customer, and a workaround is not available. Patches go through full quality assurance (QA) testing. Minor releases are released regularly to provide fixes for bugs identified in current releases, and may include some minor enhancements. These releases go through full QA testing. Such minor releases are cumulative, so you only need to install the latest minor release to benefit from all the available bug fixes. Minor releases are usually limited to high severity bug fixes. A major release will normally include all the bug fixes provided by releases for the previous version. As appropriate, bugs identified and not fixed in the release will be documented in the Release Notes. Major releases also provide functional enhancements. Our Product Managers are alerted to all product enhancement requests, and are responsible for setting the priorities by which requested new features are implemented (also subject to technical feasibility). Your license key for the current version will not work with the next major release. We do encourage our customers to install major releases as soon as it is feasible. We provide support for the methods and properties provided by the scripting command line interfaces (CLI). However, our support does not include assistance in writing scripts and we do not offer general script debugging help. When asking for support, please be prepared to provide information on your attempts to debug and isolate the problem. For example, we may ask you to provide a simple test case that demonstrates the problem, or ask you to replicate the problem outside of your application. If we cannot diagnose a problem with the CLIs, we may be limited to providing suggestions on how you can debug the application code. XenSource offers self-help (access to product documentation, the Knowledge Base, and Customer Forums) for evaluation users. We do not currently offer any additional assistance to individual evaluation users. For personal assistance or professional services during an evaluation intended to result in purchase, contact a XenSource Solution Provider partner. If you have a suggestion for how to improve or enhance XenSource products, your input is always welcome. Please visit the XenSource Customer Forums and add your suggestion to the Feature Requests and Suggestions forum. Any suggestions for enhancements to XenSource products that you submit will become the property of XenSource, Inc. XenSource may use this information for any XenSource business purposes, without restriction, including for product support and development. XenSource will not use the information in a form that personally identifies you. Table of Contents An effective support relationship depends on the technical knowledge, problem solving skills, and communication skills of your administrators and of XenSource's Technical Support Engineers (TSEs). A clear understanding by both parties of their roles and responsibilities is crucial to the effectiveness of the interaction. In order to ensure that your experience with XenSource Support is as effective and efficient as possible, these roles and responsibilities are described below, along with some best practices that can improve the problem solving process and enhance your experience. XenSource Support can work more effectively with your organization by collaborating with a regular set of contacts for technical and contractual issues. We define two types of customer contact roles for every agreement:
These roles might be filled by different individuals, or by the same person. Your Support Cases are assigned to a Technical Support Engineer. The Technical Support Engineer is your main contact for providing technical support and guidance. Their responsibilities include but are not limited to:
This section describes some recommendations and best practices for a highly effective support relationship. Read the Documentation and Plan Ahead. Before deploying our products, read the manuals and Release Notes, and review other related technical documentation for your environment. We also recommend that you carefully define your project plans and include adequate test time and a crisis plan to ensure your administrators know how to contact the vendors involved. Assign Appropriate Resources. Individuals assigned to deploy XenSource products should be experienced in the installation, operation, and maintenance of server hardware, operating systems, and applications in your environment before installing XenSource software. Often installation issues are actually issues with third party components and software, and would exist whether or not you were dealing with a physical machine or a virtual machine. Utilize Self-Help. Organizations can take full advantage of XenSource Support Service self-help tools available on the internet. You can find technical documentation, Knowledge Base solutions, tech notes, and how-tos, discuss issues with other administrators in the XenSource Customer Forums, and reference our white papers and other information. Provide Complete and Accurate Information. Providing information that is as complete and accurate as possible is critical to the timely and succesful resolution of your Support Case. See Section 2.1, “Collecting Information”. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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