xen

Xen - Can't get a Console to VMs

I've followed this otherwise excellent tutorial on getting Xen working with Ubuntu but am not able to get a console into my virtual machine (domU). I've got the extra = '2 console=xvc0' line in my /etc/xen/hostname_here.cfg file like they say, but am not able to get a console on it. If I statically assign an IP to the VM I can SSH to it...

Hardware recommendations for Ubuntu XEN server

We're planning to set up a XEN virtualization server using Ubuntu. I'm looking for any recommendations with regard to what to watch out for when buying hardware for the system. Some information about our planned usage of the system: The server is going to host 4 or 5 instances of a Linux/Apache/MySQL/J2EE stack. Each of those instances...

What is the best way to share files between Xen VM's?

Is there some built-in way to share files between Xen guests? I don't currently need to share the actual images, just some data files. ...

Is there a monitoring tool like xentop that will track historical data?

I'd like to view historical data for guest cpu/memory/IO usage, rather than just current usage. ...

Detect virtualized OS from an application?

I need to detect whether my application is running within a virtualized OS instance or not. I've found an article with some useful information on the topic. The same article appears in multiple places, I'm unsure of the original source. VMware implements a particular invalid x86 instruction to return information about itself, while Virt...

How to set up a computing cloud and how it works?

Is it possible to have all the computing capacity of all the hardware nodes allocated to one instance (for eg. one basic linux installation)? How to manage the cloud? ...

Which Hypervisors allow Raw PCI access?

I am trying to find out which Hypervisor will allow me to grant access to specialized PCI cards (such as a telephony card) to a virtual machine. So far I have tried out VMWare ESXi server and it doesn't seem to allow me to do this. I have heard that Microsoft Virtual Server does allow this, but I haven't been able to find any supporting ...

On Linux SCHED_FIFO and SCHED_RR

I'm writing a a very small daemon that must remain responsive even when a system is under severe stress. I'm looking at the differences between SCHED_FIFO and SCHED_RR in regards to scheduling, as well as trying to determine a sensible priority. Which scheduler would be appropriate for a small but critical monitoring daemon, what priori...

Logging xm console output in xen?

Is there a way I can log the output of xm console in to some file? Can I set something in the domain configuration file which automatically does this for me when I issue xm create? I tried: xm console | tee domU-console.log ... , but that does not fit in my case. I want to log the output asynchronously in background. ...

XenServer vs VMware Infrastructure

Hi, Does anyone have experience of comparing Xen Server 5 and VMWare Infrastructure 3. I'm planning a virtualization project and looking at the Enterprise edition of both. They both seem to offer very comparable functionality so am unsure which is the best option. Does anyone know any good sites or articles that compares these products...

Carrying and Working on an Entire Development Box from a USB Stick. Feasible ?

Lately I have been thinking about investing in a worthy USB pen drive (something along the lines of this), and install Operating Systems on Virtual Machines and start developing on them. What I have in mind is that I want to be able to carry my development boxes, being a Windows Distribution for .Net development and a Linux Distribution...

How to benchmark virtual machines

I am trying to perform a fair comparison of XenServer vs ESX and one comparison I would like to make is performance with multiple VMs. Does anyone know how to go about benchmarking VM performance in a fair way? On each server I would like to run a fixed number of XP/Vista VMs (for example 8) and have some measure of how quickly each one...

XEN How to put virtual machines in a directory other than /etc/xen

On my CentOS 5.2 box the XEN virtual machine configuration files have to be located in /etc/xen to be started without specifying a path. I want to move my virtual machines into /etc/xen/vm to separate them from the configuration files of the xen server. Is there an easy way to change the default directory from /etc/xen to /etc/xen/vm ? ...

Which Linux distribution should I use as a Xen host?

I ordered a server for the home office and I would like to partition it with Xen. I think this will keep things clean and easier to maintain. I will be running things like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Tomcat, and my own code. What freely available Linux distribution has the best Xen hosting facilities? ...

Simple iptables chain question

Hi, I'm writing a bash script to add simple firewalling for Xen. Here's the actual firewall configuration : Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination RH-Firewall-1-INPUT all -- anywhere anywhere Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination RH...

KVM, Xen comparison

I have the following comparison questions of KVM, and Xen: Security (how different are KVM and Xen here?) Speed(I'm a long time user of VMWare Workstation but there I'd think the loss is around 50 % to the native speed, this is IMHO too much) Stability (do Xen and KVM differ here much?) Maintainability (how difficult or easy is ot to s...

Java VMs that do not require an operating system?

I know that BEA was working on LiquidVM which didn't require an underlying operating system, but would like to know if anyone in the open source community is working on something similar. Ideally I would like to find an implementation where the VM is directly loaded by the OS boot loader. ...

is the Xen ABI a true ABI?

I was reading the wikipedia page on ABI, which describes what an ABI must specify, and the Xen page which states that they have a special hypercall ABI for their paravirtualisation. My question is, since programs will execute using say, the Windows ABI in the VM, how is the Xen ABI an ABI? ...

Xen: can't connect to hotplug

Hello, Basically i am trying to boot a domu of my own design. The Minios solo image works fine, as does mine, but when trying to add networking values the error: Error: Device 0 (vif) could not be connected. Hotplug scripts not working. The fixes for including the bash script header didn't work as they were already there. Thanks : cen...

VMware Pocket Ace alternative?

I'm looking into using VMWares Pocket Ace so that users can work from home/abroad without needing to loan out a laptop. This way I could just have a few Flash Drives that I could loan out when necessary and the user will be able to take it home and plug it into there home pc and use a similar desktop environment. Are there any open s...