I have scoured the net and gathered many resources on installing and maintaining a Xen cluster. How does LQ feel about Xen and would you use it at the enterprise level? Feel free to post your experience with Xen as well including your likes and dislikes!


Also, if you have any excellent documents on how to install and maintain a Xen cluster, please pass them my way!

Thanks!

Mike D.

I only used the live CD and i was impressed.

Some good french tutorial:
http://www.google.fr/search?hl=en&as...2F&btnG=Search

*bump*

thanks

mike

I have been using xen 3 both at home and at work for a couple of months now. For anyone considering it for the enterprise, I'd recommend you be cautious at this point in time. If you carefully plan out and thoroughly test your planned environment, you should be able to successfully use the current version of xen, but be aware that Xen is still being actively developed.

Some issues are still being worked out, and the documentation is still rather weak. The learning curve can be somewhat steep, even for an experienced unix admin, meaning most people have the most issues while they are first trying to get it installed and working. But the xen-user mailing list is active and full of helpful people, and the xen-wiki is being built up with lots of practical knowledge.

That being said, I'm thrilled at what Xen is capable of. At home, I used Xen to combine my firewall and file server into one box, saving me a little money on my electric bill (because I could turn off one always-on PC). At work, I installed Xen on my office desktop, and use it to run several test servers, which I use in my job as unix admin. I can run multiple linux distros as well as freebsd, all on one system.

I'm hoping to get permission to evaluate xen and compare performance and management differences from our current freebsd servers running bsd jails for different services. I think multiple OSs under xen makes things more obvious and easier to manage, but it's an uphill battle dealing with the bsd bigots who setup our current servers.

Keep in mind that XEN is just the hypervisor. In order to leverage the technology for the Enteprise, you need to look at the capabilities such as moving a virtual machine from one server to another automatically (workload management) and whether your application stack is qualified/certified if support for your third-party tools is critical.

There are still vendors out there that will force you to replicate your problem outside the Virtual Machine realm before making any attempt to troubleshoot your problem.

In my personal opinion, XEN is at the "try it in your lab" stage and see how it would blend in with your existing infrastructure. Get other groups in your organization (backup, systems management, networking, dba's, etc.) to test their components on a Virtual Machine environment.

Lastly, remember that XEN is just ONE of the players in the Virtualization market. There are other players out there (VMWare, Virtuozzo, VirtualIron, Dynamic Reconfiguration capabilities in IBM POWER server running Linux, etc.) that may better help you meet your requirements.

JB