For my job and personal testing purposes I'd like to setup a xenserver (xen.org) at home. I've got a not so high spec i3 CPU, 16GB of RAM and plenty of free HD space to play with. For the time being I'd like to set up something like the following machines:

• NTP1
• NTP2
• DNS1
• DNS2
• DHCP
• LDAP1
• LDAP2
• Kerberos1
• Kerberos2
• OpenAFS1
• OpenAFS2

In the end I'd like to achieve having setup a fully redundant environment, hence 1 & 2. None of the VM's will be under heavy, not even moderate load, none of them will have X installed. My question is if ~10VM's is possible with a modest i3. They all need at least one vCPU and I only have 2 real ones. I have no idea how and if a xenserver can handle this (elegantly).

You'd have to have a lot of ram for 10 VM's I'd think. You might do OK I'd think.

Without knowing what cpu you have and how good the board performs we can't guess. It would be best to use a core i7 that is made for vm's or xeon but testing is just that. I doubt you'd stress it too far to skew tests.

I tend to just offer all number of cpu's to the clients. The newer vm's do a good job of allocating resources. I don't offer more than I have. That does nothing. Pretty sure you should have 4 cpu's to offer. (might be wrong on that) Dual core with two hyperthreads.??

This article compares i3 and i7 processors. It might help you with your question.

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/articl...ore_i3_i5_i7_/

My Zareason has an i3 witn 8GB RAM and it just screams, but, as Jefro says, 10 VMs is a lot.

Yes 10 is a lot of machines indeed! Well I'll just try and see what it gives, and thanks for the link!

More than the number of virtual servers I think that you need to look at the potential usage that the machines are going to have.

Your specifications might be enough or maybe not.

DNS, NTP and DHCP should be ok. Kerberos and Ldap are very unlikely to be a problem.

The biggest risk would be a bottleneck in the hard disk because of OpenAFS. But again, it depends on usage of the cluster.

When installing and configuring the clients of xen server you have two options: Image based guest and lvm based images guest. Lvm is more efficient in the hard disk usage, I would recommend you to try that configuration.

Hi and thanks r81.

At the moment I'm running 8 VM's and instead of using Xen I'm using VirtualBox for the moment on top of a Debian Squeeze w/X installed. The processor idles at around 5~8% load so I gues it'll be just fine on Xen as well.

You will be fine with the i3 for your setup.

I was running 7 virtuals on a dualcore with 8Gb of ram.

Vms weren't very active and had services similar to yours. Dhcp, dns, samba, even squid proxy, and two windows machines

At the moment I'm using virtualbox and I'm happily running 10VM's. Less than 10%CPU usage on idle. When I get some time to explore Xen, I'm sure it'll handle it just as well.

Thanks for the update and solution.