[Xen-users] RE: The death of XEN by Novell

["Venefax" <venefax@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Lynn
Why don't you take ownership of the case since obviously the engineer is not
up to date?
If you log into the box you may notice that I am pinning the dom0 to VCPU 0,
and excluding the domu's  from using it. I also restricted dom0 to 4 GB out
of 127.
Is this setup what causes the issue?
When that happened, a while earlier, I was doing a backup of a large
database over the network. The curious thing is the largest database backup
finished fine. It blew-up when I was backing up the other smaller database,
or maybe the first large database blew some buffer and the second got
affected. I cannot know, but that was the only operation that was unusual
that night. The Windows boxes have a note with a minidump, which probably
can be used to trace what driver is the culprit. I can do the same operation
tonight of somebody wants to set up some traces.

I can be reached at 954 444 7408, 24x7.
Yours
Federico

-----Original Message-----
From: Lynn Bendixsen [mailto:lbendixs@xxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Monday, July 21, 2008 7:21 PM
To: 'Mark Williamson'; 'Antoine Benkemoun'; Venefax; Ky Srinivasan
Cc: stephen.spector@xxxxxxxxxx; xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: The death of XEN by Novell

>>> On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 11:14 AM, in message
<039901c8e9c2$e5dd4530$b197cf90$@com>, "Venefax" <venefax@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote: 
> Subject: The death of XEN by Novell (case number 10406546031)
> 
> According to Novell, Xen has a flaw that in fact means it is useless.
I have 
> a single supported system with SLES SP2, where I have 3 Windows VM's
and 5 
> Linux VM's. In each of the Windows VM's I have 8 Virtual CPU's,
because I 
> have a vital SQL Server installed where my company runs all its
business. The 
> data comes precisely from the Linux virtual machines, and having the
database 
> "right there" has proven extremely efficient. But all my three
Windows VM's 
> crashed simultaneously yesterday and I lost two hours of business. I
am using 
> of course the right Novell drivers, etc., every piece of the puzzle
in place. 
> Novell already checked that. The engineers showed me a technical note
that 
> says that having more than one Virtual CPU in a Windows VM leads to
crashes.

The technical note you refer to here is outdated.  It is for SLES 10
SP1 and earlier. Here is a link to our current Support Document for Xen
in SLES 10 SP2.
http://www.novell.com/rc/docrepository/public/37/basedocument.2008-06-10.975
2681390/SUSE_Linux_Enterprise_10_SP2_Virtualization_Technology_Support_Techn
ical_White_Paper_en.pdf
To summarize breifly: we support multiple vcpus for Windows guests in
our SLES10 SP2 and later hosts.  Any issues encountered with multiple
VCPUs in windows should be reported and its certainly a high priority
for us to help you get it working.  All of the testing we do has 2 or 4
vcpus by default in each Windows VM.

> But then we cannot have any windows VM at all, hello!!! This means
that the 
> $35.000 box that I bought is the wrong box, because now I need to
remove my 
> windows VM and create a separate windows installation, and order more

> hardware, spend more money. It means that XEN is useless, because if
it only 
> can virtualize Linux, actually Virtuozzo (Open VZ) has a lot less
overhead, 
> far less. The beauty of Xen is that it is supposed to virtualize
Windows and 
> Linux together. Now, that dream is gone. In case somebody wants to
look at my 
> Novell case number, it is 10406546031



Lynn Bendixsen
Software Engineer
lbendixs@xxxxxxxxxx
801-861-2887

Novell, Inc. 
SUSE* Linux Enterprise 10 SP2
Your Linux is more than ready 
http://www.novell.com/linux



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