gpg: Signature made Thu Jan 29 14:32:30 2009 UTC using DSA key ID BF15490B
gpg: Good signature from "Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net>"
gpg: aka "Andrew James Smith <andy@strugglers.net>"
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (UKUUG) <andy.smith@ukuug.org>"
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (BitFolk Ltd.) <andy@bitfolk.com>"
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (Linux User Groups UK) <andy@lug.org.uk>"
gpg: aka "Andy Smith (Cernio Technology Cooperative) <andy.smith@cernio.com>"
Hi Richard,
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 01:19:51PM +0000, Richard Green wrote:
> I'm interested in running Xen on a spare computer in order to get some
> hands on experience with virtualisation and other aspects of running
> linux and networking. My Bitfolk VPS is running Debian, and I have the
> most experience with that distribution, however I think I saw that
> Bitfolk were using Ubuntu on new servers and was wondering which
> distribution would be best for me?
At the moment I am evaluating Ubuntu, but new servers would be
Debian Lenny.
I know others using Debian Hardy as dom0 and they are doing alright,
so if you preferred Ubuntu I wouldn't have thought it would be a
problem.
> As the computer will be used purely for experimenting with I
> thought I'd run the unstable or testing branch of whichever
> distribution in order to get the latest code.
If your goal is only to experiment with virtualisation at home then
I probably wouldn't recommend Xen to be honest. But you did say
below that you were interested in doing some staging to your bitfolk
VPS, so I'll carry on talking about Xen..
> I'd like to keep the installations as minimal and well documented as
> possible so was wondering whether debootstrap (or the appropriate
> alternative) would be the best way to go for installation of the OS?
On Debian (and derivatives) you can use Steve Kemp's excellent
xen-tools to provision virtual machines. I don't do this because I
started doing it before xen-tools existed and haven't got around to
changing my ways yet, but the end result is pretty similar and
xen-tools gets you there a lot easier.
> Its likely that I might want to use the host for staging/testing of my
> virtual machine destined for my Bitfolk VPS, is there anything I'd
> need to do in particular to make sure that it'd be compatible? or
> would any Xen domain be easy to copy over?
In general they are easy to move around. You just need a filesystem
that can be booted. At the moment I am keeping guests in LVM
volumes (one LV per block device) and using pygrub to boot them, so
the guest needs valid a grub config. grub itself does not need to
be installed though there is no harm if it is.
The only real gotchas I have found so far are:
- if you were to use Debian Etch or something of that vintage for
your dom0 then you would have problems with the kernels of newer
distributions as guests.
- Ubuntu in their wisdom have made the Intrepid kernel incompatible
with anything older than a Hard backports dom0 kernel. So either
use mad bleeding edge dom0 kernel or else use older kernel on Intrepid
guests.
- Start 64-bit unless you're sure you'll never need more than 16G in
the dom0! Also Bitfolk will likely be 64-bit hypervisor with
32-bit dom0 and guests for the foreseeable future, if you wanted
to replicate configuration.
> Finally, as I said above I'd like to document and record the
> configuration and running of the host as much as possible. I
> previously tried using dokuwiki for a similar purpose, however I had a
> few issues when it came to printing the documentation and would like
> to make keeping and (if possible) automating documentation as easy as
> possible. So I'd appreciate any suggestions on that.
I just use a wiki, configurations in subversion, and am slowly
introducing configuration management in the from of Puppet, which I
do recommend highly even if you only have a few machines.
Cheers,
Andy
--
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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