Re: [Xen-devel] Lightweight domains

["Goldsack, Patrick" <patrick.goldsack@xxxxxx>]

Havard,

We have previously deployed Xen VMs using SmartFrog with a significantly
older version of Xen and I doubt that the code we have would wotk with
the current release. We used it to deploy large numbers of distributed
Xen virtual machines over many servers, and then to deploy services into
them, all in a single deployment transaction, from a single description.
This was also optionally intergrated with a resource manager built on
top of the Anubis SmartFrog discovery/partition membership service
(recently released to opensource).

If you decide to follow through on this, and write such a component, we
would certainly be interested in helping out in any way we can, and
would be happy to host the result on the sourceforge SmartFrog cvs
server (or alternatively, there are SmartFrog components already
availble from CERN).

Patrick
------------------------
Patrick Goldsack
HP Labs, Bristol


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Xen-devel] Lightweight domains
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 14:49:33 +0200
From: Haavard Bjerke <havard.bjerke@xxxxxxx>
To: xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

We've had good mileage from running Xen in the CERN Grid testbed and
even running regular jobs. Running three different virtual nodes, a
worker node, computing element and a storage element on the same machine
seems to be quite feasible.

Further, we want to use a system to allow domains to be brought up more
dynamically. We want these domains to be minimal, but allow optional
software to be added on demand from a library (eg. of rpms).

My current approach is to use SmartFrog, which is specially tailored for
system configuration tasks. A SmartFrog server runs on the host domain
and can be accessed from a SmartFrog client on another machine. The
entire configuration of a system - domains and their parameters can be
specified in a single configuration file.

I'd like to hear your views on this. Is there a better tool for the job
than SmartFrog?

Are there any tools already in Xen or in development that could be
useful for this purpose?

Has something like this been attempted or discussed before?

Thanks,
Havard

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