Bear with me, I''m about to dive headfirst (I hope) into Xen.
I''m a little confused by the docs, mainly because the wiki and other
docs hasn''t yet completely caught up with where I think Xen 3.0 is
at. (not a complaint, it needs community support, and everybody''s
busy developing and deploying).
Here''s where I''m at, besides my Mac OS X servers, I''m
all Dell
2850/1850 - Dual Intel Xeons (not the dual core), 4GB RAM. I am
deploying web, mysql, jabber, subversion, etc. for a cooperative
extension effort.
I don''t have a configure, make, make install background, and I
definitely don''t have a kernel build background, I know enough to get
around where I have to - but I avoid the building until I absolutely
have to do it, so for that reason, and a few others, I''m piggybacking
on my universities Red Hat Enterprise licensing. I''m running RHEL
AS 4u2 on all my servers.
I''m looking to Xen initially to solve a problem I have with trying to
deploy services outside the Red Hat "set of outdated, but stable and
supported packages" It was great for mediawiki and wordpress
installs, it turned out to be not so great for a jabber deployment
(though not bad) - and it''s turned out to be a serious pain in the
rear for a Ruby-on-Rails deployment. Not the least of which because
I went with with the EM64T version of RHEL AS - which seemed like the
thing to do at the time. I also need some breathing room on bringing
development environments and I''m out of servers to do that without
affecting pseudo-production services.
What I''m looking to Xen to do is virtualize out these RoR and jabber
environments and a few development environments, likely using Debian
or Fedora Core DomU''s - where there''s more 3rd-party packaging
for
things like jabber, lighttpd, fastcgi, etc. - and still maintain a
RHEL AS base.
So after poking around through the docs:
- I think I''m fine with installing Xen on a RHEL AS 4u2 box, and
letting RHEL AS 4u2 be my dom0 OS
- I don''t have a good feel from the docs if I''m better off
going back
to a 32bit x86 build of RHEL AS or whether I can go with the EM64T
version - what should I be doing here?
- I definitely can''t figure out if I can run a 32bit Debian/Fedora
DomU on a EM64T RHEL AS Dom0 base. (if I can''t, that answers what
Dom0 I have to go with). - what''s the answer here?
- I''m assuming that the Dell LSI Perc, the Dell remote access card,
and the other standard hardware is going to be fine. The only non-
dell server hardware on the box is a Apple XServe RAID controller (an
LSI controller) attached to an XServe RAID that I hope I can make use
of with the LVM support. I''m assuming all this because the RHEL AS
4 install is happy with all of it, and will remain happy with it as a
Dom0
pardon some of the vocabulary I might be using incorrectly - I''m
still speaking from a VMWare/Virtual PC perspective, and not quite
adapted my own vocabulary/thinking to this hypervisor thing.
I appreciate any "get me started" help y''all can provide
here.
Jason
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jason Young -- Senior Systems Engineer, eXtension
AIM: jayoungNCSU http://it.extension.org
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