[Xen-users] Migration form Xensource to XenExpress and FC / iSCSI trouble

[Ivan Porro <pivan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

after 1 year testing with xensource and three servers (8 VMs, all linux) 
at a small university laboratory I'm evaluating to migrate to the 
commercial version of the product with support, and build a SAN which 
will host our VMs.
I'have just few questions.... :-)

The FAQs says clearly that "there are no automated tools to migrate 
XenSource VMs to XenExpress/Server/Enterprise".
Is there any "unofficial" procedure to do that manually? (i.e. create a 
VM with the console and then dd the old VM img file to the newly created 
LVdisk) ?  The main problem is that most VMs are RHEL 3 (unless they're 
running 2.6.6-xen smoothly).
Even do we actually have small VMs with no production stress of I/O and 
network on them, I want to design the SAN smartly. I'm considering iSCSI 
only for budget issues. I plan to have 2-3 Xen host with a total of 
10-15 VMs.
Is this possible with iSCSI?
Are out there real world cases I may compare with?
In other way, should I go for fibre channel anyway or how can I evaluate 
the trade-off between the two solutions?
I decided for a SAN also to facilitate backup of my VMs so the idea is 
to have no or really small disks on the Xen host. Is this good in your 
experience or should I have anyway my VMs on LVM on Xen host disks?
Maybe the latter depend on choosing between iSCSI and fibre channel?

I don't want to start a flame on that but I'm also in trouble deciding 
between Dell, IBM and HP (I've one or two HP DL380G3 that I will recycle 
in the infrastructure)... any suggestion or real world experience will 
be appreciated.
Thank you in advance.

        Ivan



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