[Chester LUG] Need some advice re: Xen

[George]

Stuart Burns wrote:
> Hi Everyone

> I looked at VMWare Enterprise but the price tag is a little too much. 
> Would this machine be suitable for a Xen setup via fedora ? These 
> servers all run one bespoke app that doesnt play nice with the rest. 
> You've heard the story many times I suspect. All the machines that I 
> want to run are Windows 2000 and upwards.

I'd suggest using the free VMWare Server product. This should be fine 
for the number of machines you're wanting, plus should your needs ever 
expand to the enterprise product you can migrate the images.

My understanding of Xen (possibly a little out of date) is that it 
requires modifications to the kernel of the operating system to work 
properly and obviously this is only practical on open source operating 
systems.

> Whats a reasonable maximum guest os's to place on the machine. Can 
> anyone recommend a good setup guide for a linux newbie such as myself

The main limitation will probably be disk space. VMWare does support 
only allocating the used part of the whole virtual disk you create but 6 
copies of operating systems etc. all adds up.

If you're not used to using Linux you have the option of using Windows 
as the host with VMWare. Not that I'm discouraging using Linux but 
moving to hosting your entire infrastructure on it is a bit of a deep 
end for a learning experience :)

If you do decide to use Linux using one of the supported distributions 
listed on the VMWare site will make things easier. This means that 
VMWare comes supplied with precompiled kernel modules for that 
distribution and (hopefully) these will be kept up to date in line with 
the released patches. If you use a non supported distribution (or update 
the kernel yourself) you need to remember to remake the modules after 
any kernel update or the virtual machines won't run.

VMWare is doing a beta of their product to convert servers to virtual 
ones at the moment. There are also various free methods to do this - 
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/316 - is one I'd seen 
but there are others. This isn't something I've tried to do though so I 
can't comment on which is best.

George