PUBLIC MARKS with tag xen

virt-p2v is an experimental live CD for migrating physical machines to virtual machine guests.

In this article, Prabhakar Chaganti will show us to create virtual appliances that perform one specific function. These appliances can be web servers, database servers or anything else that you can think of which is useful for your business. The key advantage with these appliances is the fact that they are mostly maintenance free, and can be started up and then used without going through any lengthy installation process. You can use these as needed for your testing and then dispose them off. You can also use them for staging environments or production environments, and you can even share them across the enterprise.

The process for converting a VMWare VMDK disk image to Xen HVM is rather quite easy. However, there are "gotchas" that you need to consider when doing this conversion.

This tutorial explains how to convert a VMWARE image of a Debian Etch to a XEN image on a Debian Sid dom0 using XEN 3.0.3.

If you have a server with more than 4GB RAM and want to install a 32bit Debian Etch on it (following this tutorial: Debian Etch And Xen From The Debian Repository), you'd expect the Xen-PAE kernel to see all your RAM because the Xen-PAE kernel supports up to 64GB RAM. In fact, it recognizes only about 3.3GB RAM due to a bug in the GRUB bootloader. This article explains how you can fix GRUB so that all your RAM gets recognized. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

The Enomalism Virtualized Management Dashboard (VMD) is a powerful web-based virtual server manager. Designed to answer the complexity of managing globally disperse virtual server environments. Enomalism helps to ease the transition to a virtualized environment by reducing an IT organizations overall workload. The easy to use dashboard can help with issues including deployment planning, load balancing, automatic VM migration, configuration management, and capacity diagnosis.

Virtualization is the process of abstracting computing resources such that multiple operating system and application images can share a single physical server, bringing significant cost-of-ownership and manageability benefits. Through its Oracle VM product, Oracle offers scalable, low-cost server virtualization for heterogeneous applications. Oracle VM is free server virtualization software that fully supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications, and is three times more efficient than other server virtualization products. Consisting of Xen’s open source server software and an integrated Web browser-based management console, Oracle VM provides an easy-to-use graphical interface for creating and managing virtual server pools, running on x86 and x86-64-based systems, across an enterprise.

The process for converting a VMWare VMDK disk image to Xen HVM is rather quite easy. However, there are "gotchas" that you need to consider when doing this conversion.

Howto run smoothwall on Xen.

There is a great howto about installing Xen on Debian Unstable. It is really easy to do and it runs fine. Nevertheless, on production servers, that's not an optimal solution. Debian Unstable has too many updates and things change too often. On production machines, a Xen host system should be stable, secure and should not need much attention. That is where Sarge comes in. If you pull the Xen packages from backports and install them on Debian stable you've got the best of both worlds. Let's do so!

Lastly on one of the domU's, I had recently upgraded it to Etch. It was rebooted previously and did work. However after going back to Xen with Backports, its network didnt work.

Since several years, I build my own network at home, running 2 to 7 machines at the same time (gateway, firewall, workstation, devstation, servers...). In my flat, it produce a lot of noise, take too many space and consume electricty. I decided to stop that, and to run my all network into a single machine, using virtual machine. The technology that convinced me is Xen.

Creating a Virtual Server - domU There are 3 options of what to run DomU on: 1. File Based Image 2. LVM Based 3. Physical Partition 1. A file based image is the quickest to setup, however has poor/terrible IO performance. The virtual server is limited to the initial size of the image created also. The file based Image can however be easily mounted in a rescue system, and easily backed-up. 2. LVM for domU is the industry standard. After the initial setup of LVM, as described here, it is a dream to manage. LVM partitions can be resized afterwards!!! Due to this "resizing" capability and flexibility, its use for Xen Virtual Servers is ideal. They also have much better IO performance than file-based. I dont know about mounting these partitions however in a rescue system. Something to try out... -). 3. Physical Partitions have the best IO, but are difficult to alter and inflexible.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen on an Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) server system (i386). You can find all the software used here in the Ubuntu repositories, so no external files or compilation are needed.