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I’ve been using virtualized systems for years now and finally began using Xen. Xen is similar to a bare-metal hypervisor like VMWare ESX but instead of using a proprietary host OS, Xen uses Linux. Most of the common Linux distros like Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL/Fedore/CentOS, etc provide support for Xen out of the box. I’m used to using Linux and have used it for years, so it just made sense.

Previously I had used VMWare Workstation for creating test servers, etc., but that required a full host operating system. For a while, I had used Windows, then I was using Linux, but it was still clunky. I had to manually start machines after reboot and if I upgraded the kernel on the host, I had to re-run some perl script to configure VMWare. After a while, I realized it was time to let go and do things the smart way, the Xen way. However, I do still use Parallels Desktop on my Mac just to have something available when I travel.

I have a custom server in my basement that I built a few years back and have modified over time. It has a 2TB RAID 5 array that I use for my network storage. It also has a dual-core AMD processor that I might swap out for a quad-core Phenom early next year. Just before rebuilding it as a Xen box, I upgraded the RAM to the maximum 8GB. Oh, and I added a 640GB drive to store my Xen machines.

I got the Xen Dom0 built the other week and have it running just enough to basically boot and allow me SSH access. This was really just a matter of doing a base install plus the Xen kernel and booting to the Xen kernel post-install. I kept the services to a minimum for security purposes and will run what’s needed off one of the DomU machines. Before I rebuilt this box with Xen, the host OS also doubled as the file and print server. This will be moved over to the first Xen DomU I create.

CentOS 5.2 comes with Xen 3.0 and unfortunately, none of the default repos have Xen built other than 3.0. Xen 3.0 is fairly outdated and I was looking to update to a more recent version to take advantage of the new features. The only options for updating were to upgrade/install from source or to use the wonderful Gitco repo that has a few Xen versions built for EL5 based operating systems.

I’m now the proud owner of a Xen box! I’ve learned quite a bit so far and have gotten my first DomU created. I’ll detail that more in a later post. I’m also looking at setting up Puppet to deploy and manage my machines. That’ll probably be the second DomU that I create.