Re: [Xen-users] Longtime *nix user/admin planning on making the move to Xen

[Alexandre Kouznetsov <alk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi.

El 31/10/12 11:18, Braindead escribió:
> My first thought was to make my life simple and go with the XCP
(Maybe some Xen developer will read this and even wish to do 
corrections. In any case, this is a feedback.)
In my own very personal perception, XCP is a nice system to be 
integrated into an ecosystem, where you have multiple nodes that come 
and go, orchestration solution, maybe centralized storage, etc. In the 
other hand, when it's about a single (or few) host system with local 
storage, administrated by the same person who is the principal user, a 
regular Linux distribution with Xen is more suitable.
They say SuSE, as distribution, is a good starting point, since they are 
very involved in Xen development.
Personally, my distribution of choice has been Debian, which has been 
working marvelously as Dom0 and as DomU in many roles. The package 
xen-tools has everything needed to get started and do proof-of-concept 
tests.
> I'm planning on moving a mythtv backend into a domU, so I'll need to
> compile kernel support for the pcHDTV HD-5500 tuner card. Which I
> suspect means custom kernel build anyway? Presumably I can use the
> PCI passthrough feature to make the domU system see the 5500..hopefully.
Make sure your hardware has IOMMU support, which is needed for for PCI 
Passthrough.
The custom kernel is not a problem at all. The most regular way to boot 
a PV guest (at least in Debian) is taking the kernel imiage and initrd 
form the Dom0 system, but you can install any (xen enabled) kernel 
within a DomU and boot it using pygrub or something similar.
The obvious advice would be to keep Dom0 as clean as possible, moving 
services and applications to DomUs. Customize (and keep reference of) 
the xen-tools configs and templates, so you can get a very reproducible 
results each time you do a new deploy.
I always install early a cache/proxy server to use as distribution 
repository ("approx" for Debian or Ubuntu), so when I deploy a new VM 
with xen-create-image using debootstrap, it comes out fast and fresh.
--
Alexandre Kouznetsov


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