all depends on what you want the domU to do. a stripped down install can easily run in 32mb. it's the apps that eat up ram.

and if you have to beg your manager for a $30 stick of ram, maybe you should take advantage of the have a job/need a job session at the next meeting :)

Owen Berry wrote:
Thanks for the reply Jason. One concern of mine is the amount of memory
that I have. I seem to remember you talking about a stripped down domU
two meetings ago. Any tips? Or should I beg my manager for more memory?

Owen

On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 03:22:33PM -0400, Jason Tower wrote:

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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