Office server and Xen virtualization

On Friday we finally got our new server which like all our servers is getting a name from Transformers Bumblebee is a really powerful machine with an Intel Xeon X3360 (4×2,86Ghz) and 8Gb of Ram (4x2Gb) with 500Gb of storage backed up by a hardware RAID1. But this post is actually going to be about virtualization more specifically about Xen.

I started by installing Citrix XenServer5 which is now free but I didn’t like its front-end and the fact that the software couldn’t understand the servers 4 on-board NICs. Searching for something else I found that I could install Debian Lenny on the server, format the whole drive and could install XenSource on it. With the help of HowToForges Tutorial about how to install Xen on an AMD64 machine I got it to run fairly quickly. Installing a guest Debian Lenny worked right away mainly thanks to xen-tools which  unlike XenServer5 enables you to install Debian x64. My next step was to install a Windows Server 2008 x64 as another guest using a tutorial which someone wrote who had an X running on their server. After having a lot of trouble with it I finally got it going… the solution to why I couldn’t connect to the vm via vnc was that I simply had to use “vif = [ 'type=ioemu, bridge=eth0' ]“ instead of some weird bridg0. The installation was smooth but the mouse in the vnc didn’t stay in sync with my mouse (you have to add “usbdevice=’tablet’” so it stays in sync). After poking around in the VMs for a while I noticed that I was running out of space on my 4Gb virtual drive so I looked around and found this nifty tutorial to expand my virtual drive.

Side notes:

• modprobe sky2 would have made the on-board NICS work in XenServer5.. well the XenSource solution seems color
• /usr/lib/xen/ stuff is called /usr/lib/xen-default/ in Debian Lenny

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