What are the minimal required FC6 packages for Dom0?

[Aryanto Rachmad]

Hello All,

I am going to try to split the services on my server (IBM xSeries 330, dual 1GHz Intel
processors and 4GB RAM) into 3 or 4 VMs using Xen on FC6. So I plan to move all the
packages to those virtual machines based on their services. What are the minimal required
packages to run Xen on FC6?

As my server does not Intel-VT support so I suppose I can not have fully-virtualised
guests. What is actually the advantage of this feature?

Cheers,

Anto

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Sat, Oct 07, 2006 at 10:25:32PM +0200, Aryanto Rachmad wrote:
>  Hello All,
>  
>  I am going to try to split the services on my server (IBM xSeries 330, dual 1GHz Intel
>  processors and 4GB RAM) into 3 or 4 VMs using Xen on FC6. So I plan to move all the
>  packages to those virtual machines based on their services. What are the minimal
> required
>  packages to run Xen on FC6? 
If you install the 'xen' RPM the dependancies will ensure that the minimal
set of required packages are pulled in. Anything else is really just upto
you & what kind of management tools  you require in Dom0.

>  As my server does not Intel-VT support so I suppose I can not have
> fully-virtualised
>  guests. What is actually the advantage of this feature? 
Fully-virt just lets you run unmodified operating systems (notably Windows,
or older versions of Linux for which there is no Xen kernel available).
If you only care about running modern Xen enabled Linux  kernels then
you have on need for fully-virt. As a general rule, if there is a paravirt
version of your desired OS available, using that will always be preferrable
to fullyvirt. The network & disk I/O is much faster in paravirt, and since
the kernel is informed when the hypervisor re-schedules it, it can do much
more accurate process accounting in the guest. It is basically impossible
to do accurate process scheduling in fully-virt, since the guest kernel
has no knowledge of the fact that its running under a hypervisor.

Regards,
Dan.
-- 
|=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston.  [phone] -=|
|=-           Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
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[Aryanto Rachmad]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange(a)redhat.com&gt;
To: "Aryanto Rachmad" <aryanto(a)chello.at&gt;
Cc: <fedora-xen(a)redhat.com&gt;
Sent: Saturday, October 07, 2006 10:43 PM
Subject: Re: [Fedora-xen] What are the minimal required FC6 packages for Dom0?


>  Fully-virt just lets you run unmodified operating systems (notably Windows,
>  or older versions of Linux for which there is no Xen kernel available).
>  If you only care about running modern Xen enabled Linux  kernels then
>  you have on need for fully-virt. As a general rule, if there is a paravirt
>  version of your desired OS available, using that will always be preferrable
>  to fullyvirt. The network & disk I/O is much faster in paravirt, and since
>  the kernel is informed when the hypervisor re-schedules it, it can do much
>  more accurate process accounting in the guest. It is basically impossible
>  to do accurate process scheduling in fully-virt, since the guest kernel
>  has no knowledge of the fact that its running under a hypervisor.
>  
Thanks a lot Dan,

I am actually planning to use Windows XP on one of the guests. So in this case I can not
do that, cann't I? But on the other hand, I prefer para-virtualised as it has more
advantages as you explained.

Cheers,

Anto

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Sat, Oct 07, 2006 at 11:12:00PM +0200, Aryanto Rachmad wrote:
>  ----- Original Message ----- 
>  From: "Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange(a)redhat.com&gt;
>  To: "Aryanto Rachmad" <aryanto(a)chello.at&gt;
>  Cc: <fedora-xen(a)redhat.com&gt;
>  Sent: Saturday, October 07, 2006 10:43 PM
>  Subject: Re: [Fedora-xen] What are the minimal required FC6 packages for Dom0?
>  
>  
>  >
>  > Fully-virt just lets you run unmodified operating systems (notably Windows,
>  > or older versions of Linux for which there is no Xen kernel available).
>  > If you only care about running modern Xen enabled Linux  kernels then
>  > you have on need for fully-virt. As a general rule, if there is a paravirt
>  > version of your desired OS available, using that will always be preferrable
>  > to fullyvirt. The network & disk I/O is much faster in paravirt, and since
>  > the kernel is informed when the hypervisor re-schedules it, it can do much
>  > more accurate process accounting in the guest. It is basically impossible
>  > to do accurate process scheduling in fully-virt, since the guest kernel
>  > has no knowledge of the fact that its running under a hypervisor.
>  >
>  
>  Thanks a lot Dan,
>  
>  I am actually planning to use Windows XP on one of the guests. So in this case I can not
>  do that, cann't I? But on the other hand, I prefer para-virtualised as it has more
>  advantages as you explained. 
Yeah, for Windows XP you'll need an Intel-VT or AMD-V  capable CPU.

Regards,
Dan.
--
|=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston.  [phone] -=|
|=-           Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
|=-               Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/               -=|
|=-  GnuPG: 7D3B9505   F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505  -=|