[Xen-users] Most stable Xen, and LTS distros

[Fischer Udo Attila <udo@xxxxxx>]

Hi all,

As here some people with long year daily practice I have some questions:

Which is the most stable xen hypervisor, with good I/O performance?
- Setup will be dom0 will have drbd on lvm and used as disk space for 
host, failover to other drbd node.
- Heartbeat will be used, drbd primary activation will be done by Xen 
script. (It was the only real stable solution, where drbd could gone 
secondary on other side).
- No pci, usb passthrough needed, only good I/O performance between  
DomU-Hypervisor-Dom0 due it doing the network mirroring.
- It should be stable, an extra 2-5% overhead is not an issue.
- I do not need jumbo frame any, due this bridge-start problem, I moved 
this part to Infiniband, due the used hw prices are very low:)
- Live migration will not be used due not exactly the same hw and it 
failed 5%.  Load balance not needed, the systems must be restarted when 
a kernel update happens, so it will also cause an outage, and by hw 
failure an outage of  5+1 minutes is acceptable... (ok the Dom0 kernel 
update cause a +2 minutes outage, but still will be in the 5 minutes window)

I am using SuSE/OpenSuse for over ten years, but the buggy latest 
release and the shortening of the update maintenance period has forced 
me to look around for other distros for Dom0. I realized, thet 
Redhat/CentOS has a kernel with a bug, which looks will not be corrected 
due backport problems (I looked at the kernel code and the official 
patch is for a later kernel version, and the base code has changed a 
lot). It makes unloading the iptables modules impossible, when the 
Infiniband network is running... (the modprobe process stucks at 100%, 
not killable).
Is there any Xen Dom0 kernel maintained, witch can be used to the 
Redhat/Centos 5.4?
I do not want to totally wanted to go to an Debian based as the Ubuntu 
LTS, as I read it does not support the Xen out of the box as OpenSuse or 
Redhat does. Has anybody experience with that? Has the Debian version 
any open bugs Xen related?
Maybe I will use opensuse 11.1 and planning updates within a year when 
RHEL 6 comes out....
Have somebody experience with Kvm vs Xen performance, when the Dom0 or 
the Host OS doing raid or even drbd? Because the most I/O will go 
through the DomU->Hypervisor->Dom0->(Hypervisor->)Infiniband/Network 
path maybe there will be more overhead by drbd disk performance in case 
of bare metal hypervisor.
br
Udo Attila Fischer

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