PUBLIC MARKS with tags install & xen

Xen is a GPLed virtualization solution available in Debian 4.0 Etch repositories. This article help you to create a coherent Xen installation, with backups and minimum security enhancements. This guide fits my vision of a Xen setup. If it does not fit yours, you are free to adapt it to your needs, or to not use it. For information In this guide, i use the term "virtual host". Be aware that Xen use its own terminology. In a Xen setup, instanciated (aka. started) virtual hosts are called "Domains". Once your computer configured for Xen, all the operating systems run in "domains". The original operating system, where the Xen's control tools are installed, is called "dom0" (for domain No zero). All the guest operating systems are said to be installed in a "domU" (for User domain). As i'm a little lazy (well, yeah... very lazy), i don't want to endure this mind twisting, and i will mainly use the "virtual host" term in this guide. So, if you read this guide, don't by angry at me because of the terms i use.

Out of the box, Zimbra is tuned for a fairly beefy machine. Zimbra will easily consume 1.5GB of ram with default settings. Some of these changes mean turning off a few Zimbra features and there are quite a few ways to do this, so you will need to evaluate memory usage given your own situation. If you simply can't live without *all* the Zimbra features or intend to support a larger (> 15) number of users, my only suggestion is to get more ram ;). But if you are willing to make some compromises, please read on. The changes below are ones that I found to be a reasonable compromise. With a few easy changes, you can bring the memory consumption way down, so that it will hum along just fine on a server with ~512MB of ram. Of course this reduces the amount of users that your server can support, but I've found that for a small installation of around 15 users, these settings will work just fine and give you the same performance as the out-of-the-box config with gobs of RAM. The server I have been testing with has 560MB of ram, and after tuning consumes all the ram and only about 80MB of swap on average. You will find that if you don't make changes similar to the ones suggested below with ~512MB of ram, your Zimbra install will slowly creep up its consumption of swap and your Zimbra install will start to crawl. Also, > 512MB seems to be about the minimum amount of ram to get a useful/zippy server

In previous chapters we have covered the steps necessary to install and configure Xen and Xen based guest operating systems. This chapter is dedicated to explaining the xm tool, and how it can be used to manage guest operating systems from the command-line. If you prefer to use the graphical virt-manager tool to administer your Xen configuration see Managing and Monitoring Fedora based Xen Guest Systems. Contents * 1 xm Command-line vs xm Shell * 2 Listing Guest System Status * 3 Starting a Xen Guest System * 4 Connecting to a Running Xen Guest System * 5 Shutting Down a Guest System * 6 Pausing and Resuming a Guest System * 7 Suspending and Resuming a Guest OS * 8 Saving and Restoring Xen Guest Systems * 9 Rebooting a Guest System * 10 Configuring the Memory Assigned to a Xen Guest OS * 11 Migrating a Domain to a Different Host

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen on an Ubuntu Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) server system (i386). You can find all the software used here in the Ubuntu repositories, so no external files (apart from a fixed Ubuntu Xen kernel to enable networking for the virtual machines) or compilation are needed.

If you get this "4gb seg fixup" message on tty and/or in your /var/log/messages after the reboot to the Xen Hypervisor on Etch, you should check if you installed libc6-xen on your system. If not, install it, and reboot the system again.

This how-to provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen on an already working Debian Etch system. You can find all the software used here in the Etch repository, so no external files or compilation are needed.

This short guide describes how to install Windows XP or Windows 2003 Server on Xen. It provides an overview of the Debian Linux Etch installation, and detailed steps for installing and configuring Xen and starting the Windows XP or Windows 2003 Server installation.

Ganeti is a virtual server management software tool built on top of Xen virtual machine monitor and other Open Source software. However, Ganeti requires pre-installed virtualization software on your servers in order to function. Once installed, the tool will take over the management part of the virtual instances (Xen DomU), e.g. disk creation management, operating system installation for these instances (in co-operation with OS-specific install scripts), and startup, shutdown, failover between physical systems. It has been designed to facilitate cluster management of virtual servers and to provide fast and simple recovery after physical failures using commodity hardware.

If you have a server with more than 4GB RAM and want to install a 32bit Debian Etch on it (following this tutorial: Debian Etch And Xen From The Debian Repository), you'd expect the Xen-PAE kernel to see all your RAM because the Xen-PAE kernel supports up to 64GB RAM. In fact, it recognizes only about 3.3GB RAM due to a bug in the GRUB bootloader. This article explains how you can fix GRUB so that all your RAM gets recognized. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!