[Sussex] Ubuntu used in the fight against AIDS

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Geoffrey Teale wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-03-17 at 17:57 +0000, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>> It's much clearer to me. *COOL*.
>
> Glad it helped.
>
>> For questions, have you played with Xen or VMware to make the
>> appliances transferable to different hardware configuratons? Or
>> would that be giving away secrets?
>
> Well, what Xen can and cannot do is not something I'm in a position to
> keep secret :-)  I think the FSF would revoke my membership! :-)
>
> I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here though.
>
> If you mean "have we used Xen to make ourselves a bit less dependent
> on specific hardware?", then yes, that is one reason.
>
> If you mean "have you used Xen to allow you to shift running images
> around to deal with different situations?", then no, we haven't but
> it's certainly an idea we're aware of and something we may well do in
> the future.

Oh, switching live images is one of its trickiest applications. I'm 
currently using it for system backups: shutdown the OS, LVM snapshot the 
disk or partitions, then restart the OS in less than 40 seconds downtime for 
the server, almost irrelevant of its size. Then backup the snapshot image at 
your leisure.

It's also *iincredibly* useful for QA environments, where you don't have 
spare hardware to install a dozen machines for different configuraitons but 
can easily test out the variety of setups on the same box by using Xen 
images, and be confident that it'll run on other Xen servers the same way. 
That can seriously avoid the requirement of building half a dozen different 
low-end servers, and simply install one robust server.

> We only ever tend to use Xen server side and on development desktops
> at the moment (it's handy to be able to set up networks of virtual
> machines when you're developing p2p appliances), we don't use it on
> laptop appliances.

Fair enough. RHEL 5 just came out with built-in Xen, and CentOS will be out 
with it within 2 weeks, if some customer is unhappy with Debian for some 
reason.