[Gllug] Co-lo

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 10:51:29AM +0000, Richard Jones wrote:
> 
> It's that time of year again ...
> 
> What recommendations would gllug people give for a reasonably priced
> co-lo facility where we can host a single 1-U server, with power and
> either unlimited or generous bandwidth?  We would want to provide the
> server hardware.
> 
> Rich.
> 
> PS. I'm a bit annoyed with Bytemark at the moment because they haven't
> answered our queries, aren't rolling out Xen as fast as they said they
> would, and all the clocks on the machines are out of synch.  Anyone
> else having problems with them?

Xen is an awesome technology, but I can understand why they'd not be  
rushing to roll it out. The 2.x series had some non-trivial design
issues - too much responsibility for setting up hardware was given to
the hypervisor, rather than being left up to the Dom-0 operating
system. These are fixed in 3.x series, but the first 'stable' release
of this series took alot longer to bake than people were expecting & 
as can be seen to previous Fedora Xen rawhide kernels, there has been
frequent breakage when syncing with upstream kernels.

UML by comparison is a pretty well-known quantity which works reliably 
today, albeit with certain limitations (no NPTL threading) & at a 
performance disadvantage compared to what Xen will be able to offer. I 
think Xen will really stabalize & mature very quickly in the next 3-6 
months now that its becoming a mainstream part of Linux distros (eg, 
forthcoming FC5 has Xen support upfront in Anaconda) & will be an
awesome base for virtual hosting. Until it reaches this mature state
though I think commercial hosting companies would feel alot more support 
pain switching from UML to Xen.

Regards,
Dan.
-- 
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|=-   berrange at redhat.com  -  Daniel Berrange  -  dan at berrange.com    -=|
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