[Fedora-xen] Paravirtualization with Fedora 7 in Pentium IV

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 10:05:48PM -0400, Gastón Keller wrote:
> Hello, everybody. I'm planning to play with Xen (version 3.1.2) in a
> machine with a Pentium IV and 2 GB of memory. Fedora 7 is the
> installed OS (kernel 2.6.21-7.fc7xen), so I guess I'm going to use
> Fedora 7 for guests as well (can I use Fedora 8 for guests?).

You can certainly mix different guests on different hosts.  In fact,
the ability to run different versions of the operating system is very
useful for testing and development of software.

> I'm considering using a second disk of 140 GB with LVM, in order to
> change the disk space allocated to the guests in case I need to.

Yes, LVM is a very good match with virtualization.  It's also much
faster to use LVM, instead of (eg.) file-backed guests.

Give each guest a generous amount of disk space -- usually at least
8 GB for a simple guest install.

> My next consideration is how to deal with the installation tree. I
> think that downloading the files from a repository each time I want to
> create a new guest would be kind of silly, so I'm considering the
> suggestion in the Fedora7VirtQuickStart [0] of downloading it once and
> making it available from the host OS through NFS... or maybe through
> HTTP using a web server (this last option is just a sudden thought
> without much evaluation of its value =P ).

I'm using exactly this scheme -- with HTTP (ie. Apache) as it happens,
just because it was easier to set up.  For Fedora you can mirror
everything in the /os/ directory, for example
http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/i386/os/

> Any suggestion or comment? I mean. I might be doing something stupid
> due to my lack of experience. :)

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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