IT Answers » Xen

Virtual Server CPU compatability

Reasonb — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:26:35 +0000

Can you mix a Intel xeon and I7 CPU in a FORCED resource pool?

Infiniband storage network using SRP

Chris74 — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 11:01:21 +0000

Question Edited by Serena3

Making Virtualized Physical Resources Portable

Rojizo — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 22:48:38 +0000

Suppose I have a datacenter with a number of vitualization and cloud-based solutions running at the same time – KVM, VMware, Xen, etc. all of which have type 1 hypervizors and demand the undivided resources of a single physical server. How can I port physical servers from one environment to another without rebuilding from scratch? For example convert an ESX host to a KVM host and back again. What are best options – for example create a boot from SAN for each hypervisor and then reboot to a different SAN to switch physcial server from KVM to VMware. What are other options / solutions? Thanks!

VNC in Xen

Guaitaku — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:18:03 +0000

I’ve installed Debian and Xen, Xen utils and tools. I’ve set up a VM but I can’t connect via VNC. Before that I was able to connect to vnc with Debian + gnome, but to reduce resources I reinstalled the same debian but without any X component (but using the same Xen configuration. Is there any way to use Xen + VNC (listen 0.0.0.0)?
Thanks.

How to best consolidate 5 or 6 physical PC servers into one and save on total cost?

ITKE — Wed, 19 May 2010 14:23:51 +0000

For typically small (departmental) environments consisting of 5 physical PC servers (more or less) running departmental applications, what would be the best server consolidation approach ? Do we use server virtualization ? Do we use SAN or NAS ? Would VMWare or Citrix Xen be best suited for this? What’s Microsoft’s approach to this ?
Very important: we need to focus on benefits and justifications of why one proposed solution is better than the other in terms of cost, time to implement, ease of implementation, and any other factors you think apply to this question.

VMWare or Xen?

ITKE — Mon, 17 May 2010 14:15:11 +0000

I want to construct a small private cloud with the following configuration:

Servers: commodity 1Us as far as possible.
Running almost exclusively Linux/Apache to serve web pages. A few Windows machines in a cluster running SQL server. Three Linux machines in a cluster running Vertica. Multiple developers in multiple locations globally running assorted dev products.
We want an infrastructure that allows us to:
Deploy desktops/apps to developers and end users easily and quickly.
Flex the infrastructure we need to (i.e. transfer processing power to webservers when they need it and then to the database when the database needs it).
Create the infrastructure based on commodity hardware (we do have a quality SAN for storage but want to use cheap CPUs).
At present Xen seems to me to offer more for less money, but of course data from websites is notoriously subject to caution. Any advice or experience in the matter?

Obtaining IP address in Xen

ITKE — Fri, 07 May 2010 16:38:19 +0000

After finally got XEN working, the part I’ve been struggling the most with is finding a way to get XM to report the IP address of the virtual machine it started up. The VM was in DHCP mode.
I’m guessing I could find this out using dhcpd logs (by looking up the mac address), but I’m not sure if there is a direct way.

Can we manage machines with Xen as their hypervisor on System Center?

ITKE — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:31:14 +0000

We have a few machines that are running that are using (free) Xen as their hypervisor – can those be managed?

Comparison: VMware ESX, Virtual Iron, Xen Enterprise

ITKE — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:21:11 +0000

Can anyone tell me comparisons/provide links to comparison articles on VMware ESX, Xen Enterprise and Virtual Iron? Not just performance but features? Thanks!

Packing and Unpacking Xen tarballs

ITKE — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:29:58 +0000

Using vmware I have a generic machine file that I use to quickly stand
up a vm
then customize as I need. It’s a tgz that I use and occasionally unpack and
patch to keep the OS on the generic vm up to date.

I’m looking to be able to do that with Xen, but I’m not sure
what files I need to have included in my tarball.

I tried it once without success but had to abandon it (business reasons) before I figured it out.
The files I used at the time were from the /usr/lib/xen/images and /etc/xen/vm.
(I understand paths might be different depending on OS.)
Basically I grabbed the actual disk image and what I thought were the
xen config files for that vm.

I put the files on a new machine and was able to start it using the

virtual machine mgr in openSuSE,
but could never get a console sesson. When I tried it on the command
line with xm, it would just
hang. I didn’t see any errors in the messages or xen log files

erroring when I started the vm.

Since I can’t go back and try to finish that test, I wondered if

there’s resource
someone could point me at to plan this out and give it another shot.