On Sat, Feb 17, 2007 at 12:07:47AM -0700, Admin wrote: > One of the several reasons I left a large space on the hard drive was to > establish a Debian based Xen virtual machine. To do this Xen is > installed on top of the Debian kernel.
If you are going to do this, may I recommend strongly that you start by using Debian Etch - if only because the Xen support is significantly better and more advanced than that offered by Sarge. Use the beefiest motherboard and largest amount of memory you can afford: running multiple instances of Xen concurrently will affect performance. If you have a late model AMD / Intel chip with the virtualisation extensions, you may also want to look at KVM. Now that the kqemu accelerator is GPL, you may also want to consider virtualisation with QEMU. > The Debian distribution is installed in a large partition so it can > be added to in the future. If you're really serious about this, my personal preference might be to have a very stripped down Debian as the underlying OS with absolutely minimum apps as the base system and to install apps into each VM as required. > Other distributions and/or specific Debian applications (derived from > the primary distribution in the large partition) can be installed in > secondary and much smaller partitions. > There are major advantages in setting up to a maximum of 64 partitions > lets say with each one taking a 2 Gig partition or less. Much smaller is a relative term: you may find it difficult to fit what you want into 2G. If you've 200G spare, I'd suggest something like 20G for base operating system, 16 x 10G Xen instances 16G of shared /tmp or scratch space and 4G of swap. > > Hope this answers some of the questions I have been getting of the > nature, "just set up a basic system and add what you want and don't > worry about the entire distribution". I see Xen in conjunction with > Debian as a world of opportunity to evaluate, experiment, learn, and > blow things up without losing the primary system. I see only > opportunity to learn TeTex, Emacs, lilypond, hurd and find out about > numerous applications. But what I am really looking forward to is to > develop and compile and meet face to face the death knell of a dead > system while the rest of the virtual systems carry on without a concern. > What could be better???? > You probably need binary disk1 and disk2 of the Etch DVD's - disk3 is only a few hundred MB at the moment > > Thanks, Ted > No problem, hope this helps, Andy -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]