[Xen-users] Xen, EC2, Ubuntu, KVM?

[Chris 'Xenon' Hanson <xenon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

  Hi all. Xen noob here, though I've used my share of VMWare and VirtualBox and 
been
pretty experienced with them.

  I'm buying a new powerful machine to do some hosting of various services for 
myself and
a couple of community organizations. Right now, it's all just web serving and 
mail and the
like, but it could grow into other services.

  The hardware will have two Harpertown E5405 quad-core CPUs with Intel's VT, 
and 12Gb of
RAM.

  I'm going with Xen (probably running on a 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04 LTS host) as my
virtualization platform because I like where Xen seems to be going, and I like 
the
features and design. I plan to initially migrate (P2V) two existing Linux 
webservers (one
old FC4 and one modern Ubuntu 8.04) to run as clients on my machine. Then, I 
will build a
new image from scratch (probably another Ubuntu 8.04 LTS) to take over the 
services of the
FC4 system, and retire the FC4 once it's no longer needed. The existing Ubuntu 
image I
will probably keep around as-is for quite a while as it's pretty clean and 
solid.

  As I build new images to run on my system, I'd like to keep an open mind 
towards where
they will be run in the future. For example, I'd like to ensure that if a 
client of mine
outgrows what I offer them, I can easily help them most to a bigger cloud 
environment like
AWS/EC2. This is a non-profit situation, I want what's best for them not 
necessarily
what's most lucrative for me. If EC2 gives them the best capability, I want 
them to leave me.

  So, what should I keep in mind when planning this environment? Ideally, I'd 
love to have
the exact same image running on my system, and also stored in a ready-to-run 
state on AWS
S3+EC2 so that if they ever got hit by a surge of usage, we could just flip a 
few
switches, rsync some data, and have their services move up into The Big Cloud. 
Yeah, it
would cost more, but it would give them the option to grow fast and easily.

  I'm also trying to make sense of Red Hat and Ubuntu apparently moving away 
from Xen and
towards KVM.

  I'm looking at this tutorial:
http://blogama.org/node/92

  Any comments about it?

  I'm concerned about overall performance of my legacy DomU OSes under VT/HVM. 
Obviously,
people around here prefer Xen, but how does it compare to KVM for performance 
in this sort
of situation?

  All suggestions welcomed.

-- 
Chris 'Xenon' Hanson, omo sanza lettere                  Xenon AlphaPixel.com
PixelSense Landsat processing now available! http://www.alphapixel.com/demos/
"There is no Truth. There is only Perception. To Perceive is to Exist." - Xen

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