Categories
General NSP WLUG

Xensource Xen Enterprise

I’ve been following the Xensource Xen Enterprise product for a couple of months at work. The current release ships with an install CD which preps a barebones server. It installs linux with a Xen kernel and the Xen toolset, but doesn’t ask you many questions – the dom0 is really only there to support the hypervisor after all. There are no options for software raid in the installer, but that might be because software raid isn’t considered an “enterprise” tool by some people.

Once it’s installed, you can run a JAVA based console from your desktop. This will connect to the XenEnterprise server and let you run some of the hypervisor commands as well as provision and configure domU.  XE ships with support for installing a debian server from a template, and for installing RHEL from a network install server. Apparently  it’s fairly straight forward to modify the templates or to create your own, I haven’t looked into that yet.

The console provides some monitoring of the dom0 and the domUs – network, cpu, disk and memory utilisation. The
console will connect to multiple XE hosts, letting you monitor and configure your domUs across your entire network.

One other neat tool that ships with XE is a P2V migration tool. That’s Physical to Virtual migration – you run a program on your existing physical machine, and XE will create a domU suitable for it and migrate the filesystem into the new host. However, I’ve yet to use this to see how well it works.
The kicker is, of course, the pricing. XE’s pricing is available online, and it starts at $750 + $150 annual maintainance for a 2 cpu server. The big benefits of XE come in when you have multiple servers in use, so start to scale that price up accordingly.   XE is also a bit limited in that you can’t do anything outside of the box yet. Which means that if you want, for example, pass a PCI device (eg, network card or SCSI controller) through to a specific domU, you are out of luck. This may not happen very often or at all, but it does make it somewhat less useful.

Overall, it’s a nice enough tool. If you are looking at managing a large number of densely packed Xen servers and want to be able to quickly provision new servers, clone existing servers, and migrate guests easily between hosts, it’s probably spot on.