Re: [Xen-users] Which distro to use for Dom0

[Digimer <linux@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 01/12/2011 12:43 PM, Donny Brooks wrote:
>> I don't use XCP, so I can't comment on that.
>>
>> As for clustering; Pacemaker will be the main clustered resource manager
>> going forward (rgmanager from RHCS is now being migrated away). I've
>> just started this move myself, but I do think that there are well tested
>> Xen OCF scripts for managing Xen VMs.
>>
>> The setup you will want to look at is:
>> - RHEL 6 (Fedora 14/CentOS 6)
>> - Corosync + Pacemaker (cluster core + resource manager)
>> - Fencing (aka Stonith) device (IPMI, PDU, etc)
>> - DRBD if you don't have/want a SAN
>> - qdisk for proper quorum support
>>
> Thanks for that. So far I am leaning toward Fedora 14. The Centos cycle
> is too long and usually has packages that are way out of the range I
> need (for instance OpenLDAP on my Centos 5.5 is way too old to enable
> the ppolicy stuff I need even though the release is not that old). I
> will look into the other software now.
> 
> What about a web based administration or domu creation? Are there any
> that work well with Xen and both paravirt/full-virt domu's?
> 
> Donny B.

Regading CentOS; RHEL 6.0 is out now, so I expect CentOS 6 to be out
"real soon now". It's quite a bit more up to date (~ Fedora 12 package
versions) and *much* better tested. I'd suggest you use Fedora 14 to
learn on, but hold off going live until CentOS 6 is out. I've pushed out
a couple of Fedora based clusters and have come to regret it to a
certain extent.

The 'virt-manager' tool is good for provisioning VMs. I know there was a
bug in virt-manager with Xen VMs, but that was a while ago and I suspect
it's been resolved. I've been hand-crafting the configs for some time
now, so I can't confirm. As for the cluster configuration, ricci + luci
provides a web-based config and is, I hear, much improved since RHEL 5
(again, I've stuck to hand crafting configs, so I can't confirm).

A final note on Xen + EL6. Red Hat dropped support for Xen because of it
not being in the mainline kernel. This changed in 2.6.37, but EL6 is
using 2.6.32, iirc. RH also disabled Xen support in the GUI tools like
virt-manager. I do know that there is work underway to get Xen'ified
dom0 kernels and rebuilt virt-manager et. al. packages into some third
party repo (EPEL, I think). The long and the short of it is; Xen should
be well supported in CentOS 6, but it won't be there on day one.

-- 
Digimer
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