Re: Query about suitable small servers for Xen / Debian

[Chuck Zmudzinski <brchuckz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 9/20/2023 6:40 AM, Leigh Brown wrote:
> On 2023-09-20 10:45, Jo Mills wrote:
>> I am considering re-building my home network using a couple of HP
>> MicroServers in the following manner, and would be very glad of any
>> advice or comments on the suitability of the proposed hardware.
>> 
>> Two off identical HPE ProLiant ML30 Gen10 Plus Intel Xeon E-2314
>> Quad-Core 2.80GHz MicroServers wired back to back using 1Gb Ethernet
>> (or faster) for a DRBD connection.
>> 
>> Over this will run Xen.
>> 
>> Dom0 would be Debian.
>> 
>> The server must support at least 4 off Ethernet devices each of which
>> may be addressed uniquely via passthrough.  VMs will be either Debian
>> or MS-Windows.
>> 
>> I'm not after any great performance, reliability and stability are
>> what's important.
> 
> I ran Debian/Xen on a pair of HP MicroServer N40L servers for a number
> of years, including a pair of VMs using DRBD as shared storage. It was
> totally reliable. YMMV :-)
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Leigh.
> 

Debian may be OK for your application which is as a server, but I started
using Debian for Xen virtualization of desktop systems, and Debian was a
disaster. I migrated to Fedora and end eventually to AlmaLinux using community
supported Xen builds for RHEL 9 and its downstreams such as AlmaLinux which
I use as Xen dom0. The Fedora / Red Hat ecosystem will provide much better
stability than Debian, IMO. The Debian Xen team still refuses to ship systemd
units even though the default init system on Debian is systemd! See this
for proof:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1028251#59

In that message a Debian user (me) indicated a preference that Debian ship
native systemd units to start the various Xen services. Take a look at how
the Debian Xen package maintainer defended the decision to refuse to use
systemd units. He went off on a tangent about all the work that was put in
by Xen packagers to write sysv init scripts to make upgrading to the next
Debian major release go more smoothly. He didn't say it explicitly, but he
implies that it is just too hard to migrate those sysv init scripts to systemd.
I just don't believe it cannot be done. The Debian Xen Team refuses to use
systemd, and they really have not given a good reason why not to use it on a
system that has had systemd as the default init system for almost ten years now.
And that bug is only one of several bugs that has been reported to Debian 
affecting
Xen that Debian refuses to fix even after various members of the community have
proposed patches to fix the bugs.

On the other hand, my experience with Fedora is that if there is a bug affecting
Xen and you propose a patch to fix bug, they just fix the bug and don't waste
time ranting about how hard it is to migrate sysv init scripts to systemd.

Best regards,

Chuck