Virtualization Report | David Marshall | InfoWorld | Xen sounds great, but how do I install it? | June 20, 2006 05:38 PM

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Xen sounds great, but how do I install it?

June 20, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Xen sounds great, but how do I install it?

Although Xen has been around for a while now, it still seems to lurk in the shadows of other virtualization products from VMware and Microsoft. At a time when these other companies were selling their virtualization goods for top dollar, Xen was going to fill a niche market - free virtualization for the masses. Unfortunately, it wasn't long until VMware began giving away Player and then announced that the popular GSX Server platform would change names to VMware Server and would also be distributed freely. Microsoft also jumped on the "free" bandwagon as it began giving away its pride and joy, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.

So where does that leave Xen? Well, the open-source hypervisor is still making noise in the virtualization community. How can a product that was developed collaboratively by some of the world's top engineers at over 20 of the most innovative data center solution vendors be dismissed? It can't. And with the 3.0 release of Xen, new features were added to help the product meet the demands of today's enterprises. Features such as:

Support for up to 32-way virtual SMP guests

Live migration of running virtual machines between physical hosts

Virtual machines offering near native hardware performance

Intel VT and AMD Pacifica hardware virtualization support

PAE support for 32-bit servers with over 4GB of memory

x86/64 support for both AMD64 and EM64T

Excellent hardware support as it supports almost all Linux device drivers

So with all these features and a great price, why aren't more people adopting Xen? While the adoption rate is now growing, part of the problem has been the level of complexity of actually installing it. Getting started with Xen can be a little confusing at first. Luckily, there are sites offering assistance such as HowtoForge.

Check out these great articles that attempt to help guide you through some of the pains.

How To Set Up Xen 3.0 From Binaries In Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake)

and

The Perfect Xen 3.0 Setup For Debian

If you are interested in more information about Xen, you should visit XenSource for more documentation as well as the download bits.

Posted by David Marshall on June 20, 2006 05:38 PM

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I will have to check out these two sites. I wanted to try xen but I have been intimidated by the install process and so I have been using VMWare products instead. Is anyone else having this level of frustration using xen?

Posted by: William Dwyer at June 21, 2006 06:00 AM

Check out Enomalism Virtualized Management Console - www.enomalism.com (LGPL). The application gives you a graphical interface to provision multiple xen domU's. Enomalism will also be coming out with a hardware appliance that will allow you to deploy upwards of 60 Domu's VPS' per box, i assume this is targeted to hosting companies. Definitly worth a look.

Posted by: Andrew at June 21, 2006 08:23 AM

"Is anyone else having this level of frustration using xen?"

Dude, the article is written about the fact the other people are having this level of frustration using xen.

I think it's safe to say the answer to your question is yes

Posted by: dalsen at June 21, 2006 11:25 PM

Check out openSUSE 10.1. Not only does it come bundled with XEN 3.0, it also has a YaST module for creating XEN images.

http://www.opensuse.org

Posted by: rahul at June 22, 2006 02:04 AM

Wow, great information there guys. Andrew, I've read about Enomalism in the past, good stuff. Thanks for sharing it! And Rahul, good info to have about OpenSUSE 10.1. I was not aware that it had a YaST module for creating Xen images. Appreciate the heads up!

Posted by: David Marshall at June 22, 2006 04:41 AM

I'm working on a Xen book, "Virtualization with Xen" for No Starch Press. Expect the book out 1Q07.

Posted by: Matt Frye at June 23, 2006 10:15 AM

Matt, good luck on your book. I know how hard it can be to write a book, I recently published my own book on VMware and Microsoft. After seeing how difficult it can be for people to install Xen, coming out with a good book on the subject may prove quite popular. Best of luck!

Posted by: David Marshall at June 23, 2006 08:50 PM

Its not that difficult...see link

http://en.opensuse.org/Installing_Xen3

Posted by: Victor Soto at June 23, 2006 10:04 PM

I think Xen is for Gurus only as unless you know the howto compile kernels blindfolds and all tricks in the books with modules and initrd, your pretty much on your own. You need very good knowledge way beyond network administration.

The documentation is awfull at best and incomplete, with new versions coming out without any easy to find changelog (if any) and warnings, especially from distros. Be warned that a rpm update will break your otherwise working setup 75% of the time and the old RPM are almost impossible to find for reverting to your last know version.

The bottom line: you need your own lab and get ready to deal with problems yourself when nobody answers questions, which is 75% of the time. You can also pay Windows like fees from Xensource and keep on paying big bucks for every glitches.

Otherwise, old versions seems to work ok when you know their short coming (like network stop working after transmitting over 4Gb of data etc.)

Posted by: Steven Paine at December 9, 2006 11:50 AM

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