Hi all,
I'm planning a rig that has SuSE linux in Dom0 and Windows7 in a DomU with the
PCIe video card passed through to the Win7-U and an AMD system's onboard
video for the Linux system.
Couple xen-newbie questions: does my plan work in such that I intend to have
the onboard video's DVI and the video card (at present an NV GTX-460) on the
same monitor and switch between them? How will I direct the input devices,
i.e. how do I tell which VM is active and takes keyb/mouse input?
A fantastic thing, this is. Your *best* bet: pick up a DVI/USB KVM. They're under $80 now... I think. I have an IOGear unit myself, and it works like a charm.
While you *can* use scripts to trigger hot-plugging of devices and bounce them between DomUs---which I admit is really cool to see in action---it's a little kludgey, and depends heavily on drivers behaving correctly, which doesn't always happen. To save your sanity, just grab the KVM and be done with it, and take a moment to chuckle to yourself as you plug the device into two separate outputs on one machine ;-)
For the software setup, follow the excellent guide that Casey linked in his email. It's very thorough, and is mostly identical for an AMD setup. I'll get to the hardware below.
Do I understand correctly that shutting down the Xen system will suspend the
U-VMs automatically?
Conventional suspend-to-disk behavior, like snapshotting or even ACPI standby may not work properly... But don't quote me on it.
The best behavior I could guarantee would be that, when the Dom0 goes to perform a graceful shutdown, you should get an ACPI shutdown signal sent to the DomU. The DomU, in turn, will shut off, and then Dom0 continues its shutdown.
Is it acceptable to use the Dom0 SuSE for daily work (private use) or are
there resons against it and I should rather use another DomU for that?
A matter of preference. If you've got enough RAM, I'd suggest keeping Dom0 as light as possible, as the nature of a type 1(?) hypervisor and PCI passthrough does an amazing job of affording us that luxury! Naturally, the more you abstract things, the more involved your set-up process is. For what it's worth, if this weren't a system I was using for work, Dom0 would be my primary Linux box.
Now hardware: targetting an AMD platform, what board/cpu combo has proven to
work with Win7 in a DomU and PCIe passthrough in the range of quad-core or
better and a board/cpu combo that supports ECC RAM? (thinking about 16GB, so
I'd go for unregistered modules, 4x4GB single ranked).
Regards
Dex
<snip>
I'm glad you asked! My build is AMD based, and I'm beyond happy with it. It's just perfect. My focus is a little different: maximum consolidation ratio (e.g. 4-in-1). The hardware is still a solid recommendation, but you can use a standard [7 slot] case, you can get a faster 8-core processor now, and you can also opt for individual USB controller cards. They're $12 or so a piece. You can try your luck with onboard USB, but my efforts with both the 990FX and 890FX chipsets didn't turn out well when it came to redirecting them at the PCI level. There should be more on that in my previous reply.
Also, you can ignore the suggestion for ESXi. I've been told that the issues I had when trying to get GPLPV to work against that hardware are either resolved, or an indication that I was doing it wrong. Possibly both. I haven't gotten to rebuilding the machine on Xen yet, but my priorities just haven't had room to include that project just yet. :P
And finally, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask! I've been meaning to put together a blog post or something to expound on the idea, the purpose of the machine, and the pitfalls I had when tackling the project... Sort of like Casey's guide, but with the consolidation focus rather than the dual-purpose system focus... With pictures and stuff ;)
Cheers, Andrew Bobulsky
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