I concur with the brokenness of XEN we use it with Centos 5.8 installs on machines we have no reason to migrate because they have proven to be extremely stable and just work without issues. Newer setups use KVM mostly due to needing newer kernel support for hardware or users want the latest setup for their VPS installs.
Older laptops like the core-duo's have Virtualization support out of the box and are cheap enough to start playing with. i was slightly disappointed when this became a feature and cheaper hardware had this disabled out of the box. I found 3 dell D-620's at an e-cycle place rather cheap. all support native virtualization out of the box. My shiny new i5 lenovo is unfortunately crippled and does not support KVM. Xen will run on a p4 with no virtualization support though rather slowly which is a big plus for experimenting. I think any SL linux 5 or centos5.8 should get you XEN with no issues. On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 9:11 PM, William Stearns <[email protected]> wrote: > Good afternoon, Dave, Sean, all, > > > On Thu, 5 Jul 2012, Sean Dague wrote: > > On 07/05/2012 04:01 PM, Tisdell, Dave wrote: >> >>> Great. Nice to hear about stuff in production before I "make the leap". >>> >>> Any trick about installing xen virtual machines I should be aware of? >>> >> >> If you are starting from scratch at this point, I'd highly suggest >> looking at doing KVM instead of Xen. That's what all the major linux >> distros (Red Hat, Ubuntu, Suse) are supporting now, and are building their >> tooling around. It's a better place to invest your time. >> > > Especially if you're using RH/Fedora/Centos. A while back there > were some issues building a kernel for the OS that boots the machine > ("dom0"). The patching wasn't really possible for a _long_ time and Redhat > Corp jumped ship to promoting KVM. The latest distro that had a working > kernel for the boot OS was so old it wasn't even supported. I believe > that's gotten better, but it's very clear that xen is no longer a first > class citizen. > Apologies if that sounds prejudicial - I'm just trying to warn you > that xen has been unfixably broken for a stretch of years in the past, and > that makes me nervous. I'm using KVM and have been very happy with it. > Cheers, > - Bill > > ------------------------------**------------------------------** > --------------- > "Unix _is_ user friendly. It's just very selective about who its > friends are. And sometimes even best friends have fights." > ------------------------------**------------------------------** > -------------- > William Stearns ([email protected], tools and papers: www.stearns.org) > Top-notch computer security training at www.sans.org , www.giac.net > ------------------------------**------------------------------** > -------------- >
