Re: [Xen-users] first time w/ XEN - Looking for some advise

[Tim Post <echo@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Charlie,

A few suggestions based on my experiences:

On Wed, 2008-08-27 at 13:09 -0500, Charlie Reddington wrote:
> 1.) What's the best say to setup the Raid for this? Is Raid 5 Ideal?  
> (I have a 4 disk setup - currently 3 disks are part of the raid 5 w/ 1  
> being a hotspare).

For just 3 disks, RAID-5 should be OK. A year ago I brought a server up
that had 8x 250 GB drives and made the mistake of putting them into one
big RAID-5 array. The performance hit was noticed after 10 guests were
brought up that did a substantial amount of I/O.

The server had 16 GB of RAM, so our hope was to pack it as full as we
could.. however we ended up splitting the drives up into 4x RAID1 arrays
as it became obvious that any more guests would just make things really
sluggish.

> 2.) What is the communities take on using CentOS 5 - x86_64 for the  
> base OS?  Is there anything that the base install really needs? I  
> generally try to shy away from installing Gnome/KDE/X on my servers as  
> to reclaim some resources, but the idea of having a GUI to install  
> this stuff would make things more simple I would think.

Many people are very happy with CentOS 5. Redhat is doing quite a lot of
work at simplifying tools (for instance, I can't wait to see Ovirt work
with Xen and appear in RHEL).

I personally like Ubuntu or Debian, but only because I am a big fan of
the apt package manager and find networking a little easier to manage on
Debian based distributions.

You might find CentOS a little easier to manage.

> 3.) I've read about having a separate LVM for the virtual machines and  
> one for your OS. Is this really the best way? I understand the reason  
> for the LVM, so you can add more storage as you need it, but do you  
> really need two?

Yes, this is the best way go to, for flexibility and performance. If
possible, set up the RAID so that you can have a physical volume just
for guests.

Using LVM to manage dom-0 is really just a matter of preference.. having
the guest file systems under LVM is whats most important.
 
Cheers,
--Tim

-- 
Monkey + Typewriter = Echoreply ( http://echoreply.us )


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