Topic: Free Xen Enterprise hosting upto 4 SME Servers

[guest22]

Hi all,

The XEN developers ( www.xensource.com) have been busy!

Now that both Intel and AMD have released their new processors with Virualization technology, Xen is able to vitualize *nix, Linux and Windows servers. Nothing new heh, after all there is the free VMWare server.

Wait, XEN  is GPL'ed and has a BLAZING performance over other virtualization techniques. Install Xen Enterprise on bare metal and install your guest OS's at will, with an almost bare metal perfomance! I found some interesting images with Asterisk, LAMP and other specific 'appliances'. It seems that rPath linux ( www.rpath.com ) hold some nice examples of what can be done..

There are many guest OS images out there (download an image and feed it to XEN, that's all there is to it) RH, CentOS SUSE, Gentoo, Debian and all other distro's are out there.

Now for the real question of this topic, how about cooking up a SME Server image for XEN? I have been playing with this thought about a year ago, and my 'gut feeling' is that it can be done with not too many hassle, IF you  know what you are doing. All it would take is about 2 or 3 guys working together and prep a new ISO ready for XEN.

I vision a real nice SME Server XEN image that can be installed on any XEN enabled metal, and with the FREE Xen Enterprise (XenExpress) the metal can host up to 4 real SME Servers at almost bare metal performance! That would be REAL interesting.

Now the catch.... I do not have the skills BUT if any of you guys would like to have a go at it, you already have your number 1 fan

Interested? then 'abuse' this post to get organised and get things going. All comments, suggestions, Hints&Tips are welcomed!!

Thanks,
guest

The FREE Xen Enterprise edition can be found here:
http://www.xensource.com/download/xenexpress.html

[duncan]

Hmm - Interesting. Looks like there is support for windows environments with the current version and supported processors.

[guest22]

Hi Duncan,

yep, we talked about this a while ago. As you mentioned, Xen is ready for prime time Anybody else want's to join? Please feel free to speak up.

Cheers,
guest

[duncan]

Ok - From what I can gather (and feel free to correct me) - Centos is not a supported guest. What this means is that to run a guest SMEServer installation - you would need to install a modified kernel. Not normally a problem for the run of the mill distro - but certainly a problem for SME.

It`s a little confusing in terms of documentation - but it also appears that it would have to run as a virtual machine (with emulated hardware) - not a bare metal machine - so at the moment I don`t really see much advantage over Vmware.

I get the above info from here

[Daniel B.]

Well, I've heard a little about Xen and it seems very interesting, and there's a lot of differences (and advantages) over Vmware, especially for the performances. There's no hardware emulation but hardware sharing as far as I understood the doc. But I think it'd be more interesting to run SME server as dom0 not as domU. This way, we could have a panel in the server manager to simply had another virtual machine as guest. for example, if we need a simple windows server for a specific application, we can add a little virtual machine (with a small amount of memory) just for this application. This way, SME stays the core of our network, but we can add somme little servers for specific applications. I don't have the skills to do it now but I think it would be great. I'll try to read some more docs.

[rcdata]

I have tried xen express. This system is truly much performante. It's a true sin that there isn't image of sme for Xen would be a lot a lot interesting
I've testng Xen 3.1 express on mother board Intel dq965gf, Pentium d 930 processor, 2Gb Ram and Sata disk 250Gb  with Windows 2003, Windows xp sp2  and DEbian sarge as guest. The system run as a Ferrari.
I'm much satisfying but Sme Server lacks me as guest on Xen

[Ryan483]

VirtualBox(another virtualization product) works with CentOS.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

[duncan]

VirtualBox(another virtualization product) works with CentOS.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Nice find - I`m not sure how well it would work without a gui.

I`ve just done a test install on my XP machine and Vbox has some very nice features over Vmware workstation. Nice price as well   .

[Ryan483]

Yeah vbox is neat, doesn't get a lot of press though.

I'm confused, what did you mean regarding no GUI?

[duncan]

Yeah vbox is neat, doesn't get a lot of press though.

I'm confused, what did you mean regarding no GUI?

Well - sme runs without X - so I`m wondering if it`s possible to run Vbox from the command line only.

[Ryan483]

hmmm, maybe.... found this in the documentation:

Client/server architecture. All aspects of VirtualBox and the VMs that are running can be controlled with a simple, yet powerful, COM/XPCOM API. For example, there is a command-line utility called VBoxManage that allows you to control VMs just like the GUI does (in fact, many of the more sophisticated operations are not yet supported by the GUI). You can, for example, start a VM from the GUI (by clicking on the "Start" button) and stop it again from VBoxManage.

 

[duncan]

Well I asked the question - and this is the response I got.

http://www.virtualbox.org/discussion/1/8

Might give it a try.

[mdo]

That all sounds very interesting.

Has one managed to install on SME7.x? I am failing quite early in the installation process:

./VirtualBox_1.3.2_Linux_x86.run /opt/virtualbox1.3.2
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox for Linux installation.....
VirtualBox Version 1.3.2 (Sun Jan 14 15:25:08 CET 2007) installation
Please install the header files for your current Linux kernel.
Problems were found which would prevent VirtualBox from installing.
Please correct these problems and try again.
[root@mdo002sv virtualbox]#

This is actually a test box that has been upgraded to SME7.1.1 (= using kernel 2.6.9-42.0.8.ELsmp.

Michael

[jonasbrum]

./VirtualBox_1.3.2_Linux_x86.run /opt/virtualbox1.3.2
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox for Linux installation.....
VirtualBox Version 1.3.2 (Sun Jan 14 15:25:08 CET 2007) installation
Please install the header files for your current Linux kernel.
Problems were found which would prevent VirtualBox from installing.
Please correct these problems and try again.
---------------------------------
Here is a little tutorial that I've made...
I'm running SME 7.1.3 and VirtualBox 1.4


download VirtualBox rpm RH 4

#yum install SDL
#yum install libIDL
#yum install qt
#yum install kernel-devel gcc gcc-c++ ncurses-devel kernel-smp-devel
#ln -s /usr/src/kernels/2.6.9-55.EL-smp-i686 /usr/src/linux

#chmod 777 VirtualBox...rpm.run
#./VirtualBox...rpm.run install
#rpm -i VirtaulBox....rpm

#/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

 
Cheers,
Jonas Brum
http://www.nolamerz.net
jonas@tw.co.nz

[Franco]

How does Virtualbox compare to Vmware in performance?
Vmware wins over Virtualbox in many points, only if I have a big performance gain it would be worth to switch.

Just my 0,2 cents!