Xen users - Jan 2012 - Management application on dom0 or domU

So, as I said before,

Wouldn''t it be better leaving dom0 without graphical interface, and
having the management application on a domU instead, which will
communicate with dom0 to perform the administrative tasks?

How would the management application communicate with dom0?

It looks like to me that the management tool should be out of dom0,
leaving dom0 as isolated and minimal as possible.

I am talking about managing a traditional xen hypervisor environment,
locally, not xcp, which it may be different.

I''d like to know what do you think about these issues.. thanks.

eva wrote:
>Wouldn''t it be better leaving dom0 without graphical interface, and
>having the management application on a domU instead, which will
>communicate with dom0 to perform the administrative tasks?
>
>How would the management application communicate with dom0?
OK, two separate bits here. One is whether you expose a Dom0 
management interface to it''s guests, another is whether you expose 
one generally (ie via network).

Quite a few tools (in general, not specifically Xen) work with a 
split between a GUI that runs <somewhere> and a management tool the 
GUI communicates with running on the host. Some go a bit further and 
use a shared DB where the GUI (or even text tools) update the DB, and 
the hosts acts on what it gets from the DB.
Nothing in these approaches would be Xen specific.

If you specifically want to run a management tool in a DomU, and have 
it communicate with Dom0, then that means exposing a management API 
from Dom0 to it''s guests. Personally I think that''s not a good
idea
(beyond what is *essential* for the system to operate) as it opens up 
a whole new attack vector to secure. A generic network management API 
would be better IMO - you can block all traffic (or just not run it 
at all), and it allows you to run the tools on a DomU if you wish 
(and make the traffic routable between them).

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