xen virtualization and linux distros

[Christopher Friedt]

Thanks to everyone for your suggestions on Xen :)

~/Chris

CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> On Saturday 10 February 2007 03:57, Christopher Friedt wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> My company would like to set up some virtualization on one of our
>> multi-processor / multi-core server machines, using Xen.
>>
>> I've heard excellent things about Xen. The question is, which
>> 'distro' should one use with it.
>>
>> I've been a gentooer for quite a while now, and believe that it's
>> pretty great, even for server administration. The Xen / Gentoo
>> documentation is pretty good, and they've apparently even done it
>> somehow so that when you make a new image, it doesn't have to be a
>> whole distro - only some basic necessities.
>>
>>
>> This is sort of a survey, but does anyone have experience using Xen
>> for virtualization?
>>
>> If so, which flavour of linux was used?
> 
> I integrated Xen 2x with Mandriva in June, 2005 and have been happily 
> using it ever since. Getting Xen to run on any distro isn't that 
> hard. The real work was in integrating it with the networking and 
> firewalling scripts, Shorewall in Mandriva's case, Mandriva's msec 
> system, dealing with issues related to not having access to the bare 
> metal from the virtual machines, and so on. At the time, the only 
> distros that integrated Xen were Suse and Fedora Core and "minimal" 
> installations of either weighed in at a porky 800 MB. My Mandriva 
> dom0 is 210 MB and runs fine with only 64 MB of RAM allocated to it. 
> I could get that even smaller if I did away with urpmi, which I 
> won't.
> 
> On top of that dom0, I run Mandriva Gentoo, CentOS, and Debian Etch, 
> Ubuntu. You can run whatever distro you like in a domU (virtual 
> machine).
> 
>> Are there any dis / advantages that can be highlighted?
> 
> I spent a fair amount of time on the Xen IRC channel and have found 
> the people there extremely knowledgeable and helpful. I have no 
> complaints with Xen.
> 
> OpenVZ is another option I had looked at last year. It seemed like I 
> could put more virtual machines on a given box (without overloading 
> it) due to the way that OpenVZ allocates resources compared to Xen 
> but I have never put anything into production. Xen has better 
> isolation between virtual machines but in most hosting scenarios, 
> that difference is negligible.
> 
> When I tried OpenVZ, it was with a Fedora Core 5 kernel. I submitted a 
> bug report when I got stack dumps on boot even before modules were 
> loaded. This led to an interesting conversation on IRC with one of 
> the lead developers who said that in production, they prefer 
> RHEL/CentOS because its product lifetime is 5-7 years. He said that 
> Red Hat backports security fixes to their stable kernel so it is 
> mature and contains only required fixes. He said that distros like 
> Fedora and OpenSuse often include kernels that are not ready for 
> production so new bugs are introduced constantly. He had no opinion 
> on Debian because he didn't use it. Take that conversation with a 
> grain of salt because it was on May 30, 2006 so things could have 
> changed since then, though I don't think the Fedora or OpenSuse 
> situation is any different today or ever will be given that both are 
> bleeding edge distros.
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