Luke S Crawford schrieb:
Maciej Jan Broniarz <[email protected]> writes:
Hello,
I am looking for an stable OS to use as dom0 for xen-3.4.1? What platform would
be the best choice?
They all have their ups and downs. On the penguin side, I think the
only options worth considering for a production setup is
1. what I currently use (CentOS5 with the xen.org 2.6.18-8-xen kernel
and xen tools)
This is pretty stable, you get all the features of the latest stable
xen.org release, and CentOS userland is pretty comfortable with a
2.6.18 kernel (as that is what CentOS5 expects.)
this setup works with OpenSolaris guests.
2. CentOS/RHEL5 with the CentOS/RHEL5 xen stuff
This is actually a hacked up version of xen 3.1/3.0.3 but it's
hacked up so that it now has support for most important things
(paravirt_ops guests, I mean.)
My observation using it with a large client is that it seems slightly
less stable than the xen.org xen kernel, but that might be just 'cause
I cared more about my stuff (and because fewer people have access to my
stuff, nobody is touching the ram without ESD protection, etc...)
but I did see some weird problems that i didn't see with xen.org.
I would strongly caution you to avoid the debian (or ubuntu) port of the
SUSE forward-port of the xen patch to 2.6.26/2.6.27. Evidence suggests
they are not pulling bugfixes from the suse xen bugfix tree after they pulled
the initial patch. I spent a bunch of time last night fucking around
trying to get it to work as a guest (the 'time went backwards' problem
upon save/restore)
This means that until the next major release of xen (which, I am assured,
will use a reasonably modern linux kernel) I'm stuck with a 2.6.18 dom0
if I want to continue to use Linux.
--
If you don't want to use Linux, there is NetBSD5 and OpenSolaris.
The problem with opensolaris, last time I checked, was that it didn't
support paravirt_ops linux guests, and didn't support pvgrub.
For me, those two are dealbreakers. Especially the first. I don't
want to be in the business of maintaining my customer's kernels. They
are paying me for flexibility, and they are not paying enough for
handholding, so it's essential that my stuff works in a standard manner
.
However, I imagine those things are being worked on (and OpenSolaris
may even have those features right now; it just didn't a few months
ago when I was screwing with it.)
Speaking of, has anyone figured out how to boot opensolaris as
a guest using PVGRUB? I have it working with PyGRUB, but I have
all my customers on PVGRUB.
Personally, I'm getting pretty tired of dealing with 2.6.18, so
my next server will be built with NetBSD5. I had great success with
NetBSD 3/Xen2, but I haven't used NetBSD5 outside of testing, so
we will see how it goes.
Hi !
Correct, Opensolaris 0609 (XEN 3.1) does not support Linux paravirt
guests. However I tried build 122 and 123 (XEN 3.3.1) and now it works
well. I installed Oracle Unbreakable Linux 5.3 for RAC testing purposes
(two paravirt guests). The setup is running well even with shared
disks for ASM, OCR and voting disks (while in 11gR2 everything is stored
in ASM now)
The big advantage with an OpenSolaris dom0 is the fact that you
can use ZFS (especially ZFS Vols) for your domUs. For this reason
OpenSolaris is the best choice for me.
Regards, Marc
_______________________________________________
xen-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
