Re: Xen in a production environment

["R. W. Rodolico" <stargazer@rodolico.org>]

Am not using it in production, but do have xen 3 beta installed.

I did install xen 2, but it uses the older 2.6 kernel with had some
problems with some of the newer hardware. You are pretty locked into
the kernel they have modules for, but when I got it installed, it
was pretty sweet. I used loopback mounted files for my devices,
which is likely not the optimum solution, but it worked pretty well.
On a 2GHz Athlon with 2G of RAM, I allocated 512M for each of three
virtuals and the remainder to Domain0. When I fired them all off, it
was pretty good, ie it felt like four 500M Hz computers.

That being said, when a domain has been idle for a while, it does
take a noticable amount of time for it to wake up and take its share
of the cpu. I let one stay idle for a while (while the others were
kept busy), then fired off a process. Seems like it took a second or
two for it to say "Hey, I want some cycles also" and over a period
of around 30 seconds or so it seemed to slowly gain speed as it took
more and more cycles. I know there are some parameters than can be
tweaked to modify some of this behavior

Like I said, have not done it in production the way you are talking
about. I think it would be worth checking into, however, if you have
a lot of domains that don't do much most of the time. And, from what
I've read, when Xen 3 is stable, you can get an Athlon 64 and a lot
of the task switching is done in the CPU, so that will be very, very
nice.

Rod




Simon said:
> Hi There,
>
> Wondering if anyone has used or is using Xen (open-source
> virtualization) in a production environment? Any comments if so?
>
> (for virtual hosting services)
>
> Simon
>
>


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