My XEN experience part I
Posted by scheidel21 on June 17 2010 16:47:05
In order to have better disaster recovery and redundancy plan we chose to Virtualize our new SBS box, and we chose XEN. Unfortunately the experience wasn't all peace and serenity as the pronunciation of XEN (Pronounced as ZEN) might indicate. On the other hand it wasn't that bad. I prefer to run Debian and....
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I prefer to run Debian, and I prefer the stable branch which is currently 5.0 aka Debian Lenny. The package repository holds XEN 3.2.1 with a 2.26 based dom0 kernel. This was easy to setup just some apt-get commands and voila I have xen up and running.
This was much easier than my trip to XEN a few years ago right about the time XEN 3.0 came out. At that time my Laptop an HP dv9000 had soem of the video RAM go bad one the integrate Nvidia 7600M and the Nvidia drivers and for Windows and Linux just made the system go south. However, I could still use the vesa driver in linux and the machine worked well. But I still had my XP install that I wanted to access, the only viable option for me at the time was XEN which supported physical drives and/or partitions. As it turned out the Debian packages I found at that time had issues with HVM's, so I had to downlaod the source soce for 3.0.4 and compile and install. Once that was done, I ran into a few headaches on machine configuration but it worked well.
Unfortunately for me my apt-get bliss of XEN and our new virtualized SBS server was not to last as I started trying to get the machine up and running. Because I needed PCI passthrough, and guess what? It doesn't work too well with the Debian supplied 3.2.1 XEN.
Stay tuned for our next exciting installment.