Re: [Xen-users] What hardware should I be considering?

[Eric Peterson <srcfoo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for all the info.  Good to know about the memory support
and processor support.  The more I use Xen the more I love it.

My next question relates to GFS.  I haven't searched much
regarding Xen and FC4 so please don't flame me on it. I do see there
are GFS kernel rpms for Xen using Fedora.  I used the install
script (xen-install-fc4) that xensource provides and use the
2.6.12.6-xen3_2.1_fc4 kernel version for both dom0 and domU.  I
don't suppose this also has GFS support built into it? Anyone else
using GFS and Xen?  Seems like a great way for redundancy and
failover services.  I'll search the archives, but thought maybe
someone would like to post their experience with both of them.

Thanks again.

Eric

On 12/22/05, Petersson, Mats <mats.petersson@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Xen 3 with PAE or in 64-bit mode will allow you to use > 4GB RAM (2 ^ 36 = 16 GB in PAE and 2 ^ 40 = 1024 GB of physical memory in 64-bit mode).

 

It will use Dual core processors just fine - Xen 3 supports a fairly large number of processors, I think someone was trying out a 64 CPU machine a few months back.

 

I don't know much about SATA vs. SCSI RAID, I'm using SATA in a single disk mode on one of my machines here and it works just fine - but that's just a single disk and just "happens" to be SATA because that's the disk the machine came with - not by my choice, just what it happened to have. Certainly a lot cheaper to use SATA or IDE disks if you want lots of space ;-)

 

As to file/LVM, it does depend a lot on what your target would be and how often for instance you need to resize your partitions.

 

--

Mats

---

From: xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Eric Peterson
Sent: 22 December 2005 15:48
To: Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [Xen-users] What hardware should I be considering?

I'm looking at using Xen to host our client's servers and I was trying to determine how Xen would scale and how many machines I should expect to be able to run.

I am currently running Xen 3 on a FC4 test box and have a couple of test machines running. I really like it so far and after some stress testing we're going to invest in some more advanced hardware.

What processors would you recommend?  I was thinking of dual core opterons, but I wasn't sure if Xen would work well on Opterons and take advantage of the Dual core processor.

Does Xen 3 still suffer from a 4GB RAM limit?

Has anyone had any experience with the newer SATA solutions versus SCSI disk?  I'm thinking of a SATA RAID 5 setup to save some cash and gain some needed space.

What seems to work better, running from an image file or setting up each host to use a partition? I like the simplicity of an image file, but an lvm partition would be nice because you can resize them on the fly.

Thanks,
Eric

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