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

[Bart Coninckx <bart.coninckx@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Christian Zoffoli wrote:
> 
> debian and xen are actually in different planets ...live migration is a
> pain and there are many problems in general.
> 
> If you whant something stable, updated and so on, suse sles 11 sp1 is
> the way.
> 
> Here are the main reasons:
> - it's based on xen 4.0 + many interesting additions (for example
> virtual machines snapshots --> **not only disk snapshots**)
> - it's integrated with the new cluster stack (pacemaker and friends)
> - it's integrated with OCFS2 (with many interesting patches in the tree)
> - it's integrated with CLVM (on pacemaker & friends)
> - it has pv over hvm drivers for linux and windows (in linux pv over hvm
> for 64bit VMs is better performing)
> - it has a fully working and certified infiniband stack
> - it's more lightweight than redhat (it's possible to make very light
> installations comparable in size/occupied resources to debian)
> - suse xen kernel is also the starting point of the citrix xenserver
> ...so it's not something different  / unmaintained etc
> 
>>From a performance perspective I suggest you to directly use CLVM for VM
> images storage because I've seen poor performances in QCOW2 over OCFS2
> setups.
> 
> The only big problem I can see in the future of suse is the acquisition
> by a microsoft controlled company of novell ...by the way also citrix is
> very microsoft dependant ...so the soup is almost the same.
> 
> 
> Best regards,
> Christian
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
> 

Christian,

I am particularly interested in the new snapshotting features you mention. I
could not find anything in the SLES11SP1 Xen documentation about it though.
Is this about the following out of the Xen 4.0 docs?:

    114 Snapshots:
    115 
    116 Pausing a guest will also plug the corresponding IO queue for
blktap2
    117 devices and stop blktap2 drivers.  This can be used to implement a
    118 safe live snapshot of qcow and vhd disks.  An example script
"xmsnap"
    119 is shown in the tools/blktap2/drivers directory.  This script will
    120 perform a live snapshot of a qcow disk.  VHD files can use the
    121 "vhd-util snapshot" tool discussed above.  If this snapshot command
is
    122 applied to a raw file mounted with tap:tapdisk:AIO, include the -m
    123 flag and the driver will be reloaded as VHD.  If applied to an
already
    124 mounted VHD file, omit the -m flag.
    125 


thx,

B.

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