xen would be perfect for your needs. your host OS (dom0 in xen terms)
should run fc5 as it is very easy to get xen running. you'll need 128-256mb
for the dom0 plus whatever ram you want to allocate to each guest OS (domU
in xen terms).
the hardest part is setting up the root filesystem for the domU, for centos
you'd probably use yum with the --installroot=/some/path option (i think
that's right). you can either compile your own xenified centos kernel or
use a stock fc5 domU kernel (i do the latter with my ubuntu domUs and it
works fine).
the default network mode is bridge, so each domU will get its own ip address
just like the dom0. there are also nat and route modes but bridging is what
98% of people want.
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraXenQuickstart
jason
Owen Berry wrote:
Some questions for those Xen and virtualization gurus out there. First,
some background. I run Fedora Core 4 on my workstation, but a lot of
what I develop ends up running on RHEL3/4 servers. Every now and then I
have problems because of differences in Perl modules or packaging on the
"production" machines. I suspect these problems will get worse over time
as I'm "forced" to move to more recent versions of Fedora.
I'm wondering if I could improve my lot by using Xen to setup CentOS
virtual hosts on my development machine, to more closely replicate the
production machines. Xen appeals to me over other VM techniques
because of it's low overhead - I have a decent workstation but it's
still single CPU and 512M ram.
1) Is this something that Xen would be good for?
2) Am I right in thinking that Xen would be a good virtualization
choice? I have a VMWare license, but I'm thinking it'll take too much
in the way of resources.
3) Sometimes people need to access my web server. Will I be able to
forward connections to a virtual machine, possibly using mod_proxy on
Apache. Or is there a more seemless way to do this? Not sure how
networking works in Xen, and assuming something similar to VMWare.
4) I'm thinking it would be beneficial to upgrade from FC4 to FC5 before
trying out Xen. Sound right?
BTW, I don't really want to convert my workstation to running CentOS so
please don't suggest it, unless you feel you have to. :-)
TIA,
Owen
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