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Re: Xen in a production environment



We (where I work) have been using it in a production environment for
nearly a year internally (4 subversion servers), plus on our DMZ (web
server, squid, etc) with good results, on Dell server hardware. We have
Xen 2.0.4 in production, but have migrated one server to 2.0.7 which is
considerably better, both in Xen bugfixes, and supporting a newer linux
kernel (2.6.9 vs 2.6.11 i think).

-> We got the Xen sources and compiled and installed them from source. I
tried doing it the Debian package way but it was just too hard to
rebuild XenoLinux kernels, for now the Xen install scripts are the easy
path.
-> Don't try unless you are comfortable with all the fiddly bits of
recompiling kernels, tinkering with grub, etc etc. Not all of the Linux
device drivers compile cleanly with the Xen arch and patches applied,
better to work upwords from the minimal Xen .config than down from a
fully loaded Debian .config.

-> One early deployment error we made (and the docs mention this but it
seemed a good idea at the time?) was using the filesystems as loopback
devices, on files. Easy to manage, but performance bottlenecks. Using
the lvm2 stuff to manage the Xen VM file systems is way way better.

-> Once set up these VMs work very very well, also have them working
with Qlogic SAN equipment, on Dell blade hardware, very nice.

I have seen some ISPs about that use Xen already and it seems OK,
although we are not using it this way.


On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 13:54 +1300, Simon wrote:
> 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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