Xen Virtualisation

Started playing around with Xen I stuck it on a Box i had lying around. its a AMD 950mhz with 256MB RAM, using Debian 3.1 ,its ample enough for what i want to do. Reading the docs on the installation i opted for the binary install, but it didn’t have support for the VIA motherboard so disk access was painfully slow. I downloaded the source edition ran make ARCH=xen menuconfig and added via support, then running make linux26, after that is was just a matter of rebooting and disk access was considerable better than before. I created a 500MB Debian image using debian debootstrap for use as one of the virtual domains. It really cool seeing debian boot in about 10 seconds. the config files are very easy to understand

kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-2.6-xenU"
memory = 64
name = "virtual1"
nics = 1
ip = "192.168.0.10"
disk = [ 'file:/home/virtual1/debian.img,sda1,w', 'file://home/virtual1/debian-swap.img,sda2,w' ]
root = "/dev/sda1 ro"

The people who developed Xen must have taken into account that system Administrators are lazy because the command set is very easy learned and it does what it says on the tin. Everything to do with Domain adminstration is done via the xm command, shuting down domains, migration of domains etc. Using a pre-build FreeBSD image I now have FreeBSD running on Xen link here its nice as I’ve never really played around with FreeBSD before and if i mess up it easy fixed. I really have a short attendion span now that i know how to setup Xen I’ve lost interest. typical