xVM and X11 have nothing to do with each other. X11 is just a giant memory hog, and JDS many more times over on top of that. Even with 32GB of memory, it's common to not see any gui with UNIX systems, they are unncessary. As for Windows command-line administration, I agree mostly, except Powershell, Services for UNIX, and Windows Server 2003 and beyond have a full set of tools for managing IIS, domains, dns, security, etc, you just need to read up on them those three solutions together will fill in 75% of the tasks of an average Windows sysadmin. Windows can run backgrounded, see VMware Workstation and VMware Server backgrounding, it doesn't bind with X11 or anything like you're used to with COM and compositing on Vista for instance, which makes it impossible to separate window manager and program. There is a console for installing and using xVM guests, but it is hardly necessary for operation of a server after it's setup. There's VNC support regardless of the guest type with xVM already, just a matter of toggling a flag and setting a password. You could also use rdp if you want better integration and performance after the guest is up, obviously very nice because if windows bsod's you have direct VNC not using mirror drivers or abstraction, it's like a fancy ipkvm.
James On Dec 6, 2007, at 3:43 PM, Attila Nagy wrote: >> Performance will not be very good until you have >> Windows PV disk/net drivers. I'm not sure when we >> will have publicly available Windows PV drivers > > Performance is not _that_ bad, at least I feel so. This Windows > boots up fine, in about 30 seconds. Okay, far from perfect :)), but > still, not bad. > Do you have at least an estimate when PV drivers might arrive? (say > 2008 Q1, or maybe in 6 months, or maybe sooner? Just curious.) > >> >> I would not recommend moving to zfs with only 1G >> of ram to be shared between dom0 and any guests. >> It's really meant for larger systems. > > Yeah, _I_ know that, but the owner wants everything, but gives.... a > little less :) He even speaks about having some 30 instances of > mssql on that HVM Windows... I recommended him to buy a few 8GB ECC > modules :)) > >> >> On a small system like this, you might want to >> start with Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) and then >> migrate to zfs when you go to a bigger system. >> zfs gives you a lot more functionality, but SVM >> is small and runs as fast as a native slice/disk >> in dom0. You should be able to dd the disk image >> from a svm volume to a disk file to a zvol and >> move it around at will as long as the size >> matches (I haven't done it myself though). > > Okay, I'll give it a shot. I'd stick to zfs, because of it's > simplicity and features, but it needs more memory, I know. > Somehow I always had hw raid, or zfs (lately). I don't have much > experience with svm, but I dont't think it's _that_ complicated :)) > >> >> You should also be shutting everything down >> that you can on dom0. e.g. X windows, etc. > > Sure. > Probably I missed something, but how can I get to the HVM's console > from, say an other win, on the same lan? vnc to dom0? I don't think > so. vnc to domU? > It isn't trivial to administer Windows from the command line... :) > >> >> On a side note, I have been playing with a >> script which builds a minimal dom0 which runs >> out of a ramdisk. ramdisk is about 80M compressed >> and takes about ~ 280M of memory for the disk >> when running. Good for booting of a USB stick, >> compact flash, etc. Other than the ramdisk, it >> has a pretty small memory footprint so it almost >> makes up for the ramdisk.. I need to clean it >> up and send it out for folks to play with/improve... > > Ummm... sounds interesting! > Think of me as a volunteer! :) > >> >> You would have to similar tricks that you do today >> with windows when moving to a bigger disk.. e.g. >> create >> a new larger disk, copy the old disk to the larger >> disk, use partition magic to grow the partition. > > Yes, that was my idea too. Okay. > >> >> It doesn't hurt having multiple disks... > > Not at all! > >> >> In the near'ish future, it may even make sense to >> export a zfs filesystem via cifs from the dom0 >> and have the windows domain net mount some of the >> disks depending on you performance requirements. >> You would need PV drivers of course. > > I was actually considering something similar, only with samba :) > > >> >> See this thread.. >> >> ttp://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=1 >> 66817 >> > > Great thread, thanks! I planned that I let the server compress the > win image in the night hours, and put it in a samba-shared > directory, and from there a win client machine pulls down, and maybe > writes to dvd (or directly to dvd-ram). This way the data leaves the > server. > It's almost the same theory as a zfs send/receive! Whoa I invented > the wheel! :)) > >> >> Thanks, >> >> MRJ >> >> > > Thanks for the great support, and all the work! > > Attila > > > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > xen-discuss mailing list > [email protected] _______________________________________________ xen-discuss mailing list [email protected]
