[GRLUG] xen

[Al Tobey]

On 9/7/06, Topher <topher at wcsg.org> wrote:
> Anyone played with it yet?  I have a box that I'm going to use as a VERY
> simple firewall, basically just letting me forward port 22 to an
> internal box.

I'm running Xen on my laptop right now.   WIth a Core Duo or the right
Athlon (virtualization support) you can run Windows in a VM at pretty
decent speeds.    I reinstalled Windows XP for testing stuff I write
there when I'm working on portability.   My laptop can't do this, but
they even have a config example on the Xen wiki for playing UT2003
head-to-head on one computer.

For running Linux on Linux, it's very nice.   Gentoo's support is
still wobbly, but got better once I built custom kernels with all my
drivers built-in.   Ubuntu Dapper works well if you know where to get
the deb's for Xen.    I'm currently working on trying FC6 test 2 with
good results, too.

>
> This box used to be my class server, where I'd wipe it and do a fresh
> install each semester.

Perfect.

>
> I'm interested in running my class server inside xen, and possibly other
> stuff as well.

If it's a PC, Xen can set aside PC cards to dedicate to specific
domU's (basically, client VM's - dom0 is the "master").

> It's not the toughest box in the world, but if the host OS isn't really
> doing much, it should work, eh?

Yeah, it works great.   I/O intenstive tasks are all that really
suffers under Xen, and even some workloads can be faster under Xen.

Your best bet for distros with strong support, IMNSHO, are:
FC5 or FC6t2
Debian/Ubuntu (the packages you use on Dapper are actually built for Debian)
Gentoo
everything else

I've heard SuSE 10.1 is really the best but I haven't tried it so I can't say.

-Al Tobey

> _______________________________________________
> grlug mailing list
> grlug at grlug.org
> http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug
>