Xen users - Apr 2005 - suggestions for most stable config?

I just flipped a box from a 2.6.10 dom0 that was hosting a domU via LVM2
to be a 2.4.29 dom0 hosting the same domU via a physical drive partition
and the load average in the domU (which is a backup mail server, and does
a fair bit of write I/O) dropped from about 1.2 to 0.2 ... yet the mrtg
graphs show traffic and mail volumes to be unchanged.

I did this (2.6 -> 2.4) because someone suggested offlist it might be more
stable, and someone else was told that there might still be some
performance bottlenecks in the 2.6.10 code for disk I/O ... which could be
interpretted as suggesting the 2.4 code is more polished (which
considering it is a slower moving target would make sense).

So, this begs the question: Are there guidelines for a "best"
configuration? We''re currently trying to use XEN to consolidate
machines
by elimating some old dedicated purpose boxes that probably should be
retired anyway. Stability is more important than performance, especially
if we''re going to see the physical machine reboot (and I did with the
old
2.6 config) ... After that we will use XEN to create new services, but
again, stability is more important than performance.

-Tom


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> I did this (2.6 -> 2.4) because someone suggested offlist it 
> might be more stable, and someone else was told that there 
> might still be some performance bottlenecks in the 2.6.10 
> code for disk I/O ... which could be interpretted as 
> suggesting the 2.4 code is more polished (which considering 
> it is a slower moving target would make sense).
2.0-testing has fixes for the 2.6 disk performance issue. We''re
planning
on rolling out 2.0.6 as soon as we get a chance to investigate a rare
migration issue that''s been reported.
 
> So, this begs the question: Are there guidelines for a "best"
> configuration? We''re currently trying to use XEN to 
> consolidate machines by elimating some old dedicated purpose 
> boxes that probably should be retired anyway. Stability is 
> more important than performance, especially if we''re going to 
> see the physical machine reboot (and I did with the old
> 2.6 config) ... After that we will use XEN to create new 
> services, but again, stability is more important than performance.
We use 2.6 in all of our production systems. I''d say that the vast
majority of testing is done on 2.6 thesedays.

Ian 

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