Re: [Xen-users] Xen on a laptop

[Alexandre Kouznetsov <alk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello.

El 03/06/12 00:45, Andrew Sorensen escribió:
> I am looking to purchase a new laptop quite soon, and intend to run a
> number of virtual machines.
Setting up a complex configuration of a not-too-well-known tool is 
generally a bad idea, unless you pretend to be some kind of full time 
concept tester. No matter how good advices you get about the details, 
you will probably get more pain than benefit and will have reconsider 
your whole concept a few times, before getting something actually usable.
If I may suggest, think of something simpler, focus on what you are 
trying to archive. Too much details to think of would ruin your ambitions.
From my experience of similar setup:
I need to have various systems (serves) at hand, for testing or 
demonstration purpose, and wish not to overload the main OS with all 
that functionality.
I wish be run untrusted software on a dedicated virtual machine, to 
reduce the risk of security compromise.
So, one VM as a sandbox, and maybe another as a demo server, main work 
is done on the host systems directly. The sandbox is used almost all the 
time, the server VM is turned on only while needed. The tool of choice 
would be not Xen, BTW. Then a need of extra functionality is clear, I 
would consider modifications to this setup.
1) Suspend to disk/ram
"Save" the VM's, after that suspend the host OS as usual.

2) Optimus and VGA passthrough
Forget in on a laptop, for now. It does not run out-of-the-box on a 
average desktop, will be much tricky on a laptop.
3) Wireless and networking
Leave it on the host system, until more prioritized things are running fine.

4) Disk IO issue
Has more to do with what tasks you are actually perform on your laptop, 
than with the virtualization setup.
5) Power management
Same as above, has to do with what you do. If you need you VMs to work, 
you will probably need them even on battery. If there are VM you don't 
need running all the time, better to keep them shot down by default.
6) Windows DomU
If you need decent graphics performance from a Windows VM, specially on 
more than one instance, maybe its not Xen what will work best for you. 
Nested virtualization generally does not works well with Windows, unless 
Windows is the host system.
I have once set up Xen on a laptop, accidentally. (:
Works just fine under "normal" usage, anything tricky tends to be more 
tricky than on a regular server/desktop system.
The link you provided is broken.

--
Alexandre Kouznetsov
Systems Officer
Ondore, S.A. de C.V.
Tel. +52(55) 5559-0090
E-mail alk@xxxxxxxxxx

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