[Wylug-announce] WYLUG Talk tonight...

[Jim Jackson]

Owen LeBlanc, of the University of Manchester and ManLUG (the oldest LUG
in the UK), will give a talk on Xen, one of the virtualisation
technologies. Here's what he sent about his talk...

My team always has a problem getting money to buy machines.  Originally
we provided our services using many dedicated cheap servers.  Recently,
we have been under pressure to use only high quality, expensive
boxes, but we can't replace each machine with one of these.  We have
responded by moving more and more of our applications onto virtual
hosts on Xen servers.  We tend to have a cluster of virtual machines
(geographically distributed) providing each service, and using
LVS for load balancing.  In some cases, we have only a single virtual
machine for some purposes.

We have used versions of Xen which I compiled myself, as well as
official and unofficial Debian packages.  Recently we have been
using the x86_64 architecture as well as the i686 architecture, and
have been experimenting with mixed architecture servers; i.e., with
both x86_64 and i686 clients running on an x86_64 server.

Among the applications we are running on Xen virtual hosts: LVS
load balancing, Kerberos (Heimdal) service, AFS data base servers,
web servers, servers providing interactive access using ssh/telnet/ftp,
mysql, etc.  We now have a small number of development hosts for
various platforms.

I've given presentations about our use of Xen at a local Linux
User Group meeting, at the UKUUG conference in Manchester in
March, and at a meeting of the local High Performance Computing
special interest group.  This continues and expands upon what I said
in those talks.