Hi All, First let me say that I am a big fan of Solaris x86 (even after the 2.5 fiasco) and having been 'solaris' (inc SunOS) for 16 years I am glad to see such effort being placed into the product. Because of this I am taking time to post some comments about my first play with Xen (err... hVM) within OpenSolaris.
My goal was to move from two separate hosts (opensolaris b54 & CentOS running VMWare) to a single opensolaris hosts, I was staring to feel guilty about having a fileserver and vmware host running 24x7; and it was making the room hot! Aside from the finding a Pentium D 9xx (Can't ship a 2 year old CPU from the US to Australia), waiting for SXCE b81 to be released and the metadb must be in s7 upgrade issue I got a functional B81 environment, at which point I discovered the following issues (and help/advise welcome): #1. The ugen driver seems a little broken, native boot I can see and manage my UPS, under hVM (Dom0) the ugen driver can't even set device permissions correctly or allow read/write access to cntlr0 device (it does make the device tree correctly however). #2. A 4GB machine loses 700MB to the hypervisor!?!!? huh? #3. virt-install of a linux PV is generally broken, might be the install media not having a PV kernel, but bitching about 'rpm' packages is just wrong, and I can't believe that this isn't documented any where. #4. virt-install and HVM just hangs for openSUSE 10.2.... once again, nice. #5 Doco? this python config file? all you can find are examples, no documentation about it seems to exist, for something which has been in the works since b27 (or something) this is poor. In short you can probably tell I am a little disappointed and I am about to ditch hVM and aggressively using zones and vbox... At least I'll be able to protect the storage when the power goes out (i.e shutdown). I can see a lot of work has been done on integrating Xen & OpenSolaris. It is unfortunate that the core components of the opensolaris builds have been rock stable (first build I used was B33) which has set the bar quite high for all the other projects. I understand I am opening the door for negative comments (i.e flames), but if I have made simple stupid mistakes I would like to know, If I have not then having someone highlight some issues can only make the product better. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ xen-discuss mailing list [email protected]
