[SWLUG] Learning to juggle with Xen

[Rich Williams]

Hi All,

I'd like to upgrade my desktop box to something newer (it's currently
an old (4 years) installation of Debian/unstable) - I was thinking probably
Ubuntu since that's worked out nicely on a couple of other machines
I've put it on.

The problem I have is that I can't really 'afford' much downtime, and I
don't really want to lose some of the more involved tweaks and config
stuff which I've got at the moment (my box handles incoming mail for
a domain or two, and also acts as a router in quite a complex setup -
it has 5 IP addresses).

I'd also like to learn/play around with Xen. I've got enough disks in the
box that I can spare one (two actually, since I keep everything running
on RAID-1) to do a 'fresh' install which won't touch my existing system.
(Although neither the floppy drive nor the cd-rom drive work, and I don't
think it'll boot off USB, but I'm sure I can get around that bit!)

What I want to know is, can I install a Xen-enabled Ubuntu, and then
run my old system inside Xen, relatively untouched?

>From what I've read, it sounds like I should be able to do this, but
a lot of what I've read seems to concentrate on setting up new
systems inside Xen, rather than wrapping up existing ones.

If I could get such a setup going, then I'd be able to slowly migrate
everything out of my old setup - hopefully breaking it up into smaller,
newer systems which I could then migrate intact onto another box
later on when time (and funds) permit.

So, can it be done? Has anyone done it? Any advice? Any gotchas?

Thanks,

Rich