[TriLUG] Xen 3 and non-VT enabled processors?

Justis Peters jtrilug at indythinker.com
Sat Oct 10 03:21:37 EDT 2009


Weave,

Over the past couple years, I have deployed dozens and dozens of 
paravirt guests into Xen. Not only does the latest version of Xen still 
support paravirtualized guests, it's still the best of option for 
performance. When we were initially testing, we compared to HVM with VT 
enabled processors. Performance was pathetic in comparison to paravirt.

If you have the luxury of specifying the kernel in both the dom0 and the 
domUs, it's worth it to go paravirt. If you're running a guest OS on the 
domU than can't go paravirt (e.g. Windows), you can frequently find 
paravirt drivers for network and disk. This doc is a decent starting place:
  http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenOverview

My sympathies that you ran into trouble. The configuration options for 
Xen are a bit obtuse. Best of luck next time.

Kind regards,
Justis

Brian Weaver wrote:
> So does anyone know off hand if the latest version of Xen supports
> paravirtualzation anymore? I wanted to run some linux virtual machines
> today, more specifically I wanted to kickstart a CentOS 5 system using
> Xen. I found documentation on how to configure the system but I didn't
> have access to a VT enabled processor. I tried two systems
>
> 1) A Dell D620 with a non-VT Core Duo running Ubuntu
> 2) An IBM x3250 with Dual Pentium D processor running Debian Lenny
>
> Both appeared to hang after booting and getting through a large
> percent of the startup items. At this point I'm just curious for the
> sake of curiosity. I'm probably not going to have a chance to mess wth
> Xen again for a while.
>
> Thanks
>
> -- Weave
>
>   




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