Re: [Debian-User] Xen
On Sat, Feb 17, 2007 at 12:07:47AM -0700, Admin wrote:
> One of the several reasons I left a large space on the hard drive was to
> establish a Debian based Xen virtual machine. To do this Xen is
> installed on top of the Debian kernel.
If you are going to do this, may I recommend strongly that you start
by using Debian Etch - if only because the Xen support is significantly
better and more advanced than that offered by Sarge. Use the beefiest
motherboard and largest amount of memory you can afford: running
multiple instances of Xen concurrently will affect performance.
If you have a late model AMD / Intel chip with the virtualisation
extensions, you may also want to look at KVM. Now that the kqemu
accelerator is GPL, you may also want to consider virtualisation with
QEMU.
> The Debian distribution is installed in a large partition so it can
> be added to in the future.
If you're really serious about this, my personal preference might be to
have a very stripped down Debian as the underlying OS with absolutely
minimum apps as the base system and to install apps into each VM as
required.
> Other distributions and/or specific Debian applications (derived from
> the primary distribution in the large partition) can be installed in
> secondary and much smaller partitions.
> There are major advantages in setting up to a maximum of 64 partitions
> lets say with each one taking a 2 Gig partition or less.
Much smaller is a relative term: you may find it difficult to fit what
you want into 2G. If you've 200G spare, I'd suggest something like 20G
for base operating system, 16 x 10G Xen instances 16G of shared /tmp or
scratch space and 4G of swap.
>
> Hope this answers some of the questions I have been getting of the
> nature, "just set up a basic system and add what you want and don't
> worry about the entire distribution". I see Xen in conjunction with
> Debian as a world of opportunity to evaluate, experiment, learn, and
> blow things up without losing the primary system. I see only
> opportunity to learn TeTex, Emacs, lilypond, hurd and find out about
> numerous applications. But what I am really looking forward to is to
> develop and compile and meet face to face the death knell of a dead
> system while the rest of the virtual systems carry on without a concern.
> What could be better????
>
You probably need binary disk1 and disk2 of the Etch DVD's - disk3 is
only a few hundred MB at the moment
>
> Thanks, Ted
>
No problem, hope this helps,
Andy
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