[Xen-users] just starting out questions

[Jason Young <jason.young@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bear with me, I'm about to dive headfirst (I hope) into Xen.

I'm a little confused by the docs, mainly because the wiki and other  
docs hasn't yet completely caught up with where I think Xen 3.0 is  
at.  (not a complaint, it needs community support, and everybody's  
busy developing and deploying).
Here's where I'm at, besides my Mac OS X servers, I'm all Dell  
2850/1850 - Dual Intel Xeons (not the dual core), 4GB RAM.  I am  
deploying web, mysql, jabber, subversion, etc. for a cooperative  
extension effort.
I don't have a configure, make, make install background, and I  
definitely don't have a kernel build background, I know enough to get  
around where I have to - but I avoid the building until I absolutely  
have to do it, so for that reason, and a few others, I'm piggybacking  
on my universities Red Hat Enterprise licensing.   I'm running RHEL  
AS 4u2 on all my servers.
I'm looking to Xen initially to solve a problem I have with trying to  
deploy services outside the Red Hat "set of outdated, but stable and  
supported packages"  It was great for mediawiki and wordpress  
installs, it turned out to be not so great for a jabber deployment  
(though not bad) - and it's turned out to be a serious pain in the  
rear for a Ruby-on-Rails deployment.  Not the least of which because  
I went with with the EM64T version of RHEL AS - which seemed like the  
thing to do at the time.  I also need some breathing room on bringing  
development environments and I'm out of servers to do that without  
affecting pseudo-production services.
What I'm looking to Xen to do is virtualize out these RoR and jabber  
environments and a few development environments, likely using Debian  
or Fedora Core DomU's - where there's more 3rd-party packaging for  
things like jabber, lighttpd, fastcgi, etc. - and still maintain a  
RHEL AS base.
So after poking around through the docs:

- I think I'm fine with installing Xen on a RHEL AS 4u2 box, and  
letting RHEL AS 4u2 be my dom0 OS
- I don't have a good feel from the docs if I'm better off going back  
to a 32bit x86 build of RHEL AS or whether I can go with the EM64T  
version  - what should I be doing here?
- I definitely can't figure out if I can run a 32bit Debian/Fedora  
DomU on a EM64T RHEL AS Dom0 base. (if I can't, that answers what  
Dom0 I have to go with).  - what's the answer here?
- I'm assuming that the Dell LSI Perc, the Dell remote access card,  
and the other standard hardware is going to be fine.  The only non- 
dell server hardware on the box is a Apple XServe RAID controller (an  
LSI controller) attached to an XServe RAID that I hope I can make use  
of with the LVM support.   I'm assuming all this because the RHEL AS  
4 install is happy with all of it, and will remain happy with it as a  
Dom0
pardon some of the vocabulary I might be using incorrectly - I'm  
still speaking from a VMWare/Virtual PC perspective, and not quite  
adapted my own vocabulary/thinking to this hypervisor thing.
I appreciate any "get me started" help y'all can provide here.

Jason


--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jason Young --  Senior Systems Engineer, eXtension
AIM:  jayoungNCSU    http://it.extension.org
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