Re: xen advice

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Wed, 20 Feb 2008 13:41:06 +1100
Carl Brewer <carl%bl.echidna.id.au@localhost> wrote:

> 
> I'm about to replace an oldish i386 (NetBSD 3.1) box with a celeron
> 2.8 with a current generation core2duo (8200 I think) and a couple of
> SATA 500GB HDD's that I'll run as s/w RAID1 (raidframe).  It's going
> to be running NetBSD 4.0, the aim being to be a general purpose
> server (apache, zope/plone, sendmail/cyrus/clamav/spamassassin) and
> hopefully I want to retire a development box running CentOS5 and run
> it in a VM of some form.  I'd like to use Xen as I think both NetBSD
> and CentOS will run happily with Xen and I'm pretty sure that VMware
> doesn't work too well as a host OS on NetBSD.
> 
> I'd like to run the NetBSD box as the xen dom-something (what's the 
> right term for the host?) and one or more CentOS 5 installs in DomU's 
> (right terminology for the hosted VM's?).
> 
> Is that a good configuration and likely to be stable?  If so, what 
> kernel will work best on the NetBSD host in terms of the best use of
> the multi-core CPU?
> 
I wonder if Linux would be better for the dom0, on the grounds that it
supports more features, and the dom0 is much harder to change later.
(Mind you, my dom0 is NetBSD 4.0, but I'm not sure I made the right
decision.)


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb