Xen users - Jun 2012 - Xen on a laptop

I am looking to purchase a new laptop quite soon, and intend to run a
number of virtual machines.

Since I am currently running Xen as my choice of virtualization on other
machines, I would like to run Xen on the laptop. 
Most of the DomU instances on the machine will be purely console, and
pretty straightforward in Xen to setup(DB / Web / etc) servers, however
I would also like to have Windows ready to use.

Here are some of the issues I can see with this sort of setup:

1) Suspend to disk/ram not working -- I figure I would at least need to
hook up my main DomU to handle ACPI events (can I pass through these?)
to tell the Dom0 what to do.

2) Optimus and VGA passthrough (not sure how this would work).

3) Wireless and networking -- I figure I would probably have a single
DomU to handle networking, and passthrough my network cards to this
machine - the guests would then access the network through the DomU.

4) Disk IO issues -- I will probably be getting a SSD to boot from
(mSATA), and then an Intel 520 SSD to run all my machines off of. Data
would be stored on a 500GB HDD in place of the optical drive.

5) Power management -- I would probably automate suspending of DomU
instances when the laptop is running on battery power, though this is
not a huge concern.

6) Windows DomU: I would like to run Windows in addition to Linux, at
the same time - and basically be able to switch between the instances. I
assume I would need to switch the active VGA passthrough somehow (or
secondary virtualization: VMWare Workstation?)

7) USB3 passthrough (I heard this not possible?) - I think I might be
able to use "usbnet" to solve this issue.

Has anyone successfully installed and operated Xen on a laptop, or have
suggestions/answers to the above?

The laptop I am considering is
http://web.eurocom.com/EC/ec_model_config1(1,225,0) if it matters in any
way.


-- 
Andrew Sorensen
Twitter: http://twitter.com/AndrewX192 
Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115244690052850979822/



_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@lists.xen.org
http://lists.xen.org/xen-users

Hello.

El 03/06/12 00:45, Andrew Sorensen escribió:
> I am looking to purchase a new laptop quite soon, and intend to run a
> number of virtual machines.
Setting up a complex configuration of a not-too-well-known tool is 
generally a bad idea, unless you pretend to be some kind of full time 
concept tester. No matter how good advices you get about the details, 
you will probably get more pain than benefit and will have reconsider 
your whole concept a few times, before getting something actually usable.

If I may suggest, think of something simpler, focus on what you are 
trying to archive. Too much details to think of would ruin your ambitions.

 From my experience of similar setup:
I need to have various systems (serves) at hand, for testing or 
demonstration purpose, and wish not to overload the main OS with all 
that functionality.
I wish be run untrusted software on a dedicated virtual machine, to 
reduce the risk of security compromise.

So, one VM as a sandbox, and maybe another as a demo server, main work 
is done on the host systems directly. The sandbox is used almost all the 
time, the server VM is turned on only while needed. The tool of choice 
would be not Xen, BTW. Then a need of extra functionality is clear, I 
would consider modifications to this setup.

1) Suspend to disk/ram
"Save" the VM''s, after that suspend the host OS as usual.

2) Optimus and VGA passthrough
Forget in on a laptop, for now. It does not run out-of-the-box on a 
average desktop, will be much tricky on a laptop.

3) Wireless and networking
Leave it on the host system, until more prioritized things are running fine.

4) Disk IO issue
Has more to do with what tasks you are actually perform on your laptop, 
than with the virtualization setup.

5) Power management
Same as above, has to do with what you do. If you need you VMs to work, 
you will probably need them even on battery. If there are VM you don''t 
need running all the time, better to keep them shot down by default.

6) Windows DomU
If you need decent graphics performance from a Windows VM, specially on 
more than one instance, maybe its not Xen what will work best for you. 
Nested virtualization generally does not works well with Windows, unless 
Windows is the host system.

I have once set up Xen on a laptop, accidentally. (:
Works just fine under "normal" usage, anything tricky tends to be more
tricky than on a regular server/desktop system.

The link you provided is broken.

-- 
Alexandre Kouznetsov
Systems Officer
Ondore, S.A. de C.V.
Tel. +52(55) 5559-0090
E-mail alk@ondore.com