[PLUG] Xen virtual machine

[Arindam]

> Has anyone tried Xen virtual machine?

I tried the Xen hypervisor 3.0.2 (comes with kernel 2.6.16) on RHEL4
u3. Do build from source, and edit the Makefile to create the xen0 and
xenU targets instead of the xen target only.

> I hv 1.5 GHz celeron M and 256 MB ram. Can anyone
> please tell what would be the performance on this
> machine?

Performance could be depressed. Xen and most other
(para-)virtualization environments are processor intensive. I tried on
a Dell PowerEdge server with 128 Megs only memory and a single CPU of
2.8 Ghz. The performance as acceptable. I created a single RHEL4 u3
guest domain with 512 Megs memory (obviously virtualized). It ran
reasonably well but don't expect very high performance on the box you
mention. Keep around 1 Gig of swap space.

> How much disk space is repuired?

Depends on what OS you would like to run in your guest domains. Xen
itself does not take a lot of disk-space ... hardly 50 megs I would
assume.
1) But if you are running a guest OS, you might either want to make a
separate partition where you install the OS (without a bootloader) and
then boot it with Xen.
2) Or you could create a disk-dump of an existing OS installation on a
similar architectures as your box and store it as a disk file on a
local partition. You can mount this as a loopback file system to
verify its contents. And of course you can use Xen to boot it.

Either way, I guess you would have to give yourself around 5 Gigs of
space (either make the partition or store the image file allowing for
sufficient space).

Cheers,
Arindam

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