The Xen solutions including installing and configuring Dom0 and DomU are summarized here. LVM volumes as backing for DomU’s file system is an appealing solution to Xen VBD. LVM volumes can dynamically grow/shrink and snapshot. These features make it simple and fast to duplicate DomU and adding storage to DomU. LVM backed DomU is recommended….
Creating file-backed virtual block device (VBD) for Xen virtual machines and installing Fedora 12 in Xen DomU via internet will be introduced. Note that this tutorial is based on a pretty old OS (Fedora 12). But the method here is still valid while some minor details may need to be changed for latest Xen and…
Please refer to for the latest stable Xen Dom0 solution. In this post, the detailed tutorial for setting up Xen 3.4.1 dom0 on top of Fedora 12 with kernel 2.6.29 will be introduced. Hardware: Dom0 hardware platform: Motherboard: INTEL S5500BC S5500 Quad Core Xeon Server Board CPU: 2 x Intel Quad Core Xeon E5520 2.26G…
Previously, we create a configuration file for each DomU virtual machines in our cluster. Most of the content in these configuration files is the same. The differences are only the name, memory size and image file address. There are several disadvantages of this method: We must create and configure a new configuration file when creating…
A script for backing up file-backed Xen DomU is introduced in this post. This script can be changed to similar platform. In our cluster, virtual machines are stored under /lhome/xen/. Virtual machine with id vmid is stored in directory vmvmid. The raw image disk file name can also be derived from vmid. Some more details…
I have done some I/O performance benchmark test of Xen DomU. For easier management, some of our DomU VMs are using file-backed VBDs. Previously, our VMs are using Loopback-mounted file-backed VBDs. But blktap-based support are recommended by Xen community. Before considering changing from loopback based VBD to blktap based VBD, I have done this performance…
Assumption: There are VBD based Xen DomU virtual machines stored under /home/xen/vm-f11-sample/. There are two files under vm-f11-sample: vm0-f11.run (The configuration file) and vmdisk0 (The virtual disk). Now we want to duplicate the virtual machine vm0 stored under vm-f11-sample to vm-10.0.0.213 which is stored under vm-10.0.0.213. And vm-10.0.0.213’s ip will be 10.0.0.213. The steps to…
Please refer to Setting Up Xen Dom0 on Fedora : Xen 3.4.1 with Linux Kernel 2.6.29 on Fedora 12 for the platform of this test (this test runs on Fedora 11, however). I have done some simple performance test on DomU and Dom0 and compare with the performance on physical machines. These test are simple,…
We need more loop devices on Linux than the default number (most commonly 8) some time, such as we are building 12 or more virtual machines on top of xen using loop device backed VBD. In this post, we want to use 32 loops. 1. If loop device is compiled directly in the kernel Pass…
In this post, these content are introduced: Create and manage file-backed virtual block device (VBD) for virtual machines on xen. Install Fedora 11 via internet as DomU on top of xen. Manage virtual machines using xm. Create file-backed VBD: The actual space of VBD will be the amount of disk the virtual machine used. And…
We may want to run some jobs for every two weeks/months/days… under some situation such as backing up for every other week. In addition, we may add more complex rules for running jobs, e.g. run a command when the load of the server is higher than a certain level. With the help of the shell…