[COLUG] summary of 7/25 meeting: Explorations in Xen part 1 and topics for 8/25

[Jim Wildman]

After some initial confusion about my ip addresses and some struggles
getting X forwarding to work correctly, we got down to the
business of demonstrating Xen.  As a build server we had a Compaq
DL380G1 running Centos 4 and the following services: dhcp, named, http,
mrepo, cobbler.  As clients we had 2 Compaq DL360g2 boxes one with 2
CPU's and 750M of RAM, the other with 1 CPU and 1G of RAM.  Both clients
were running Centos 5 -xen kernels

I summarized the installation of Xen as:
 	Install Centos5/RHEL5
 	configure a repository for installation images
 	run virt-install or virt-manager to create images

We performed the following tasks
 	used xm list with and without clients to list
 	started a previously configured client with xm create
 	began installation using virt-install
 	monitored running VM's using xm top and virt-manager
 	connected to and from VM's using xm console
 	watched performance with top on the host side
 	watched performance of the clients with xm top

We discussed issues around
 	Memory issues.
 	Device type issues.  What do various devices look like inside the
 	VM?
 	How do you use physical partitions?  logical volumes?
 	Problems with the text client, issues with all the clients in
 	general such as lack of security, restriction to a single host

There was much interest in live migration of images.

Notes that I took for future topics included

What are tap devices for?
How is console logging done?
How much memory does DOM0 use?  require?  Why doesn't the domU memory
usage impact dom0?  and vice versa.
How is locking handled for multiple access to the vm's?
How does migration work?
Can /etc/xen be moved (turns out it is not needed since the xend's
transfer the config files during migration)?


any comments?

Most likely Russ will be presenting on xen on Saturday.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wildman, CISSP, RHCE       jim at rossberry.com http://www.rossberry.com
"Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best
state, is a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
Thomas Paine
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wildman, CISSP, RHCE       jim at rossberry.com http://www.rossberry.com
"Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best
state, is a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
Thomas Paine