[Xen-users] dom0 large and in charge or petite?

[Scott Classen <sclassen@xxxxxxx>]

Hello xen gurus,

I've recently acquired a new computer for the express purpose of
exploring xen. Eventually I would like to explore global shared
filesystems and the ability to migrate running domUs between different
physical computers, but for now I'm just trying to get a sense of how
many domUs I can run on a single Xeon and generally exploring the
capabilities and limitations of xen.

my test computer:
Supermico X8SAXS Motherboard.
A single Xeon L5630 2.13GHz CPU - 4 cores/8 threads
12GB RAM
9650SE- 2LP 3ware RAID car with two 1TB drives in RAID1 configuration.
dom0 and all domUs are using the 3ware. domUs are using a disk image
file (i.e. disk = [ 'tap:aio:/var/lib/xen/images/xen1.img,xvda,w', ] )

I've installed stock CentOS 5.5 xenified kernel
(2.6.18-194.26.1.el5xen) and 4 identical domUs with 2VCPUs and 2GB RAM
each:

dom0 = 8 VCPU 4GB RAM

xen1 = 2 VCPU 2GB RAM
xen2 = 2 VCPU 2GB RAM
xen3 = 2 VCPU 2GB RAM
xen4 = 2 VCPU 2GB RAM

My questions:
1. Since I only have 8 threads maybe is this too many domUs? Will they
be constantly fighting over CPU cycles?

2. Should dom0 be the most minimal installation needed to administer
the domUs? Do the resources allocated to dom0 affect the performance
of the domUs?

3. Should I leave only 1 GB RAM for dom0 and give the rest to the domUs?

Thanks, for any general advice on setting up xen.

Scott

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users