Re: recommendations for a Xen/NetBSD box?

[Carl Brewer <carl%bl.echidna.id.au@localhost>]

Thankyou Manuel, a few more hopefully not too dumb questions below :

Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 01:12:23PM +1100, Carl Brewer wrote:
> > Thanks Luke, maybe I need to give a bit more background. I have a 
> > current NetBSD 3.1 server, running sendmail, cyrus, a couple of 
> > zope/plone instances and some general purpose stuff on it, and it's also 
> > a build server for some of my client sites - I look after a few NetBSD 
> > smb servers & Internet gateway boxes etc, they're either 4.0 or 3.1 (one 
> > is still 1.6 ... but it's slated for an upgrade as soon as I can 
> > convince the client it's necessary).  So binary compatibility is a 
> > feature I want to keep on it with the other NetBSD boxes I manage, and 
> > also when I migrate the current server to it (Cyrus and Zope in 
> > particular I want to be able to pick up and drop off and have 'just 
> > work' on the new xen-ified server.  I understand that if I take the 
> > server to 4.0 I'll need to bump the other sites up, but I can manage 
> > that, but -current is not an option.  Proper releases only.  There's a 
> > xen kernel that comes with 4.0 and 3.1, it's Xen 3 I think?
> >
> > I also have a CentOS (RHEL) 5 box, that is a development box I use to 
> > test & devel on before installing into a co-located server interstate in 
> > a data center, running the same (CentOS 5).  This needs to be as 
> > bog-standard as possible as I don't have console access to the remote 
> > box so it needs to be standard and stable, which is why it's a RHEL 
> > ripoff, not one of the other more volatile distros.
>
> Here's what I would do with these contraints:
> - use NetBSD 4 i386 as dom0
> - use -current, NetBSD 4 or NetBSD 3 as domUs, depending on needs
> - Make the CentOS domU an HVM domU, so that you can run the CentOS i386 kernel
>   and not the Xen one. This way it'll be the same kernel as you run on your
>   colocated box (only different module of course, as the disk and network
>   devices are probably going to be different - for HVM guests Xen
>   emulates a PIIX IDE and USB controllers, a cirrus VGA device,
>   and a ne2000, AMD PCnet-PCI or realtek 8139 network device).

I now have the hardware, and decided to splash a few extra bucks for 
some more RAM (it was cheap).  I now have 6GB of RAM, which means if I 
want to allocate ~2GB to a couple of domU's, and some smaller chunks to 
some testbed domU's, can I do this with a NetBSD 4.0 i386 on RAID1 dom0?

Is there any special magic I'll need to be able to use the extra 2GB?

I don't mind if the CentOS 5 kernel has different modules, as long as 
it's one that can be maintained using yum etc from the standard CentOS 
(RHEL) repositories.  Ie: if I have to use the CentOS 5 xen kernel 
that's ok, as long as it's the standard one that ships with CentOS 5.

I don't mind if the dom0 is some special release if necessary, as I 
don't expect to use it for anything except managing the RAID disks and 
being a host for the domU's.  I'm going to start playing with this 
tonight I hope. I want move my NetBSD 3.1 i386 box into a domU in the 
next couple of days and the CentOS box in a week or so.

Lastly, and this is a real stab in the dark .. has anyone here had any 
success or heard of anyone getting SCO Openserver 5.0.x running in any 
sort of a VM at all?  I know of some successful stuff with VMware but 
didn't have much luck myself at the time I was trying to get it to work 
(needed a FDD?! I haven't seen one of them for years!), but with the 
Intel E8200 having hardware virtualisation support, is there any chance 
SCO 5.0.x might work in a domU at all?