[Pkg-xen-devel] Extraneous kruft [signed]

[Ralph Passgang]

Am Freitag, 17. Februar 2006 23:27 schrieb Jeremy T. Bouse [c]:
>     To this I can say I'm running an internal firewall/gateway, web and
> mail under VMWare right now because I had physical hardware failure and
> these are nothing added to my 2GHz AMD64 w/ 1.5GB RAM. I do have both my
> NS and both my MX servers running under xen 2.0.7 (Yvettes packages)
> right now on two 930MHz PIII machines and I have a 1.6GHz 64bit AMD
> machine ready to go with xen3 once we have packages available.
>
>     Incidently I have a 7' telco rack in my spare bedroom serving as my
> home office.

nice indeed...

I'm working for a small local isp here in germany/bonn and we are selling 
virt. root server since about 4 month now (dom0 = debian/sarge, and we 
started with xen 2.0.7, now we use 3.0.1-pae and for that we have one dual 
xeon 2,8ghz system with 4gb ram and 300gb hdd (3 sata disks/raid5) with 13 or 
14 customer domU's (mainly also debian) running the moment. We have also 
bought a second system were we wanted to sell virt. windows server but we 
disliked vmware because of the overhead and the price and disliked virtuozzo 
because of some security related issues (and some feature were missing as we 
tested it), so we hope we can sell virt. windows servers with vt-enabled 
systems in future and will buy some testing hardware with a pentium D (dual 
core) end of february (when it is really available in germany). For internal 
usage we have another dual xeon system with 2gb ram and two 36gb scsi disks 
(raid1) (which definitly needs more ram and hdd) and about 9 domains now. 
This is working with xen 3.0.0, because I haven't updated it to 3.0.1 for 
now.

I had some trouble with pae on the dual xeon, but as Ian Pratt told me it was 
also related to the 3ware controller we use. Besides that I have saw one domU 
crash (still on xen2.0.7) and no crash on 3.0.x, so it's working very stable 
and is definitly very fast. With 14 customer domains we only have about 
20%-25% of the available cput ime really used.

The bottleneck with such a dual xeon host is not the amount of ram or cpu 
utilisation, but the disk drive performance. We would be able to sell 30-40 
virt. root servers on this system (with more ram), but without better hdd 
performance we will most likely will not sell more then 15 or max. 20 systems 
on one box.

We are also testing san servers based on multiple disks (4 at the moment) 
which are striped and on top of that we use: drbd (with ha), lvm & gnbd. It's 
working very well (also with live migration of domUs between diffrent xen 
systems) and it's fault-tolerant because of drbd and heartbeat, but we still 
need to do performance testing. If we have better data rates then a normal 
raid5 setup then this is a real cool solution.

another thing that I test at the moment is networking booting xen hosts (with 
pxe) and having the root device also imported via gnbd (so not just the domU 
filesystems)... I need to solve some issues with that setup, but at least 
it's booting and running now, so it should be possible. 

So really a lot is possible with xen :)

--Ralph

> Ralph Passgang wrote:
> >I just wanted to say, that I would like to see a lot of migrations of
> > vmware servers to xen in future, because xen is definitly a real
> > alternative, at least since 3.0.0 and maybe even more with 3.0.2 if svm
> > is available and the (old 2.0.x) feature of passing pci-devices should be
> > available too.
> >
> >--Ralph
>
> --
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