..::B:R:A:D::..

…well, a little more than a weekend. The same weekend that I experimented with Vista I also started experimenting with Xen. I had briefly experimented with Xen in the past but that was mostly with the Xen LiveCD available at the XenSource website.

[SLES 10]

To start off I figured I would test Xen on Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 since SLES10 “…is the first enterprise platform to include a fully integrated and supported version of Xen 3.0″ and there has been a lot of chatter between Red Hat and Novell about how “enterprise ready” Xen really is. Once installed and booted into the Xen-enabled kernel I as able to use the Xen utility in YaST to get it setup and create my first image. The install took, literally, hours to finish which was extremely disappointing. Once installed I could ssh or VNC into it and make any changes to the system I wanted. The Xen tools in YaST are extremely bare, not really much too it. Basically: install, start, stop. I am assuming they have the more flashy Xen management utilities bundled in their ZenWorks product…Which is probably what they were demoing last year at BrainShare when they migrated a live image to another physical server without losing connection while streaming a video???

[XenMan on SLES 10]

After the initial install of an instance on Xen using Novell’s YaST utility I wanted to try the XenMan utility for managing Xen. I noticed this project a while ago and had it bookmarked in Firefox as something to keep an eye on. It has more of a VMware-esque interface to it. It doesn’t seem that you can just do an install off of a CD/DVD, unless I missed something totally obvious, so first I setup an NFS share of the install source. After that the install went fairly smoothly as expected, nothing too exciting. XenMan also recognized my install from the YaST utility so now I had two working installs on top of Xen.

[Red Hat Enterprise 5???]

I did download the beta of RHEL 5 but I found nothing about Xen at all on the DVD. I did later read that a lot of people who were too anxious to get the beta’s ended up downloading old images that didn’t have all the current stuff on it (or something like that?), so I assume that is what happened to me. After that I didn’t feel like downloading another whole DVD .iso image.

[XenEnterprise 3.0 from XenSource]

XenEnterprise 3.0 from XenSource was the nicest experience with Xen I have had to date. During the install you have several options including converting an existing install to a Xen-capable install or letting XenEnterprise to take over the entire disk with it’s own minimal Linux install. I choose to let it take over my disk. Once installed you need to use the XenEnterprise Administrator Console from another system to manage it. The Administrator Console is nice!

I setup three Debian guests: Debian-VM01, Debian-VM02, and Debian-VM03. The first one I used as a webserver, the second a MySQL server, and the third another MySQL server so I could experiment with mirroring two MySQL servers. I then installed Joomla, Wordpress, and MediaWiki on the webserver pointing their databases at the MySQL server on the second. Performance overall was very impressive given the specs of the machine with three guests running at once.

That’s it so far, but pretty cool.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Linux. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.