Re: recommendations for a Xen/NetBSD box?

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

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).


-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--