Re: [Xen-users] Moving to Xen

[Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> First post so please be gentle! ;)

Hi :-)

> I am looking to switch to Xen from using VMware but would like a little
> help with my understanding.  My current setup is a CentOS5.1 server with a
> VMWare server instance installed on top of it.

OK.

> Am I able to install Xen and make my current CentOS installation the
> default domain without losing anything ?

You can install the Xen hypervisor and the -xen Linux kernel.  Install 
virt-manager at the same time, it's good ;-)

This will just give you an extra grub boot option to boot into Xen rather than 
into native Linux.  It'll probably boot into Xen by default from then on, but 
you can always use the Grub menu to boot without Xen, then uninstall Xen from 
your system.

You won't be able to run Xen and VMware server at the same time.

Your existing CentOS installation will become "domain 0", which is the 
privileged management domain.  It'll still own the keyboard, the mouse, the 
monitor and all the other devices.

> If this is possible then I would 
> setup two additional domains 1) for the applications that were running in
> the default ie. www, smtp

You can easily create new CentOS, RHEL and Fedora domains using a handy 
virt-manager GUI.  It can either create fully virtualised or paravirtualised 
guests.  Paravirtualised has better performance, fully virtualised is needed 
to support Windows, etc (and is only available if your hardware is new 
enough).

> and the 2) moving the VMware server which runs 
> Zimbra to a Xen domain.

If you actually want to move the virtual disk from VMware server to a Xen 
domain, you might need to do some conversion steps to get it to work.

> Is my thinking correct ?  TIA.

Yep, that seems like a reasonable plan.

Cheers,
Mark

-- 
Push Me Pull You - Distributed SCM tool (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~maw48/pmpu/)

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