Offering Linux hosting

[Thomas Cameron]

A. W. Wright wrote:
> Thomas Cameron wrote:
>> A. W. Wright wrote:
>>
>>   
>>> Is it worth it to keep hosted applications in a Virtual Machine? We
>>> tried Xen, but it seems to crash the server, I don't know if it has
>>> anything to do with the processor not supporting native virtualization.
>>> What VM software would you recommend, or are there any good
>>> articles/books to read?
>>>     
>> I host several customers using Xen on RHEL 5.  Solid as a rock and very 
>> fast.  No hardware enabled VT, just paravirt.  What distro were you 
>> using that crashed?
>>   
> Installed is Debian etch with backports. Maybe not the best idea to use
> backports.org for production applications?
> 
> Additionally, I keep a mirror of the server for testing on a virtual
> machine, and it didn't like Xen at all, it ran very slow, taking 10
> minutes to boot. I remembered, virtual machines on virtual machines
> don't work very well.

Wow.  That's been the exact opposite of my experience in RHEL.  Xen is 
lightning fast, especially if you install the guest OS to a raw 
partition (i.e. /dev/sdb1) or to an LVM slice (i.e. 
/dev/mapper/XenVol-Node01).  It's silly fast, quick to install guests, 
and easy as all get-out to spin up guests as needed.

-- 
TC