I am liking SuSe Studio quite a bit.

I’ve made a Xen server barebones OS on top of which to run xen virtual machines, and built it in SuSe Studio. Very painless process, which produces a very small download, which requires zero installation. Well not zero installation, since on initial run there needs to be some unassisted setup done by the system. Continue reading →

This site is great. Especially the bit on XEN Virtualization, found here.

Lots of good info on adding USB devices to guest, adding block devices to running guests, booting guests from a NFS share, and much more…

To backup virtual machines running on LVM use this guide.

I am trying to configure pfSense as a XEN VM, and the main difficulty is getting the network adapters to work properly.
I have successfully ran pfSense as a VM in OpenSuSE 10.3, and I am documenting this to make life easier for next time.
Continue reading →

I never know where to find Virtual Machine Appliances especially for XEN.
This is a list of some sites that collect appliances:
http://www.virtualizationdaily.com/archives/23_sources-for-free-virtual-machinevirtual-appliance-images.html

I have crashed the xen dom0 server again. Well not crashed, just that I can’t access the RAID5 data anymore until I reboot.
This has happened before, and is avoidable by not copying any files in dom0 to/from the RAID5 mount point. But today I got carried away, and did just that.

Anyway this has spawned thoughts or a re-organization. I have tried to install XEN 3.2, but it didn’t seem to want to start, so I chalked it up to the fact that the xen-tools-iomem files didn’t have a 3.2 version.

I briefly checked opensuse 11.0, and I think it comes with xen 3.2 (but I”m not 100% sure). So I could upgrade the opensuse 10.3 to 11.0 alpha just to test xen 3.2. I don’t know if 3.2 will fix this issue, so it seems like a pretty long shot just to test for a feature.

The other option is to move the 4 drive RAID array to a FreeNAS or OpenFiler xen virtual machine. This would be much less effort, since all that would really change is where the RAID management software resides. The base xen server software would remain intact.
This option would however require me to buy a 500gig drive to mirror the existing data, make the drive change (in software) and copy the data back, then return the HD.

The other option is to do nothing. Everything works just fine, so I just need to remember to not make this mistake again, and all will be well.

Passing PCI devices to domU guest OSs
On the host OS, make this into a script, and run it:

modprobe pciback
SLOT=0000:01:06.0
echo -n $SLOT > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/bttv/unbind
echo -n $SLOT > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/pciback/new_slot
echo -n $SLOT > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/pciback/bind
SLOT=0000:01:06.1
echo -n $SLOT > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/pciback/new_slot
echo -n $SLOT > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/pciback/bind
SLOT=0000:01:07.0
echo -n $SLOT > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/pciback/new_slot
echo -n $SLOT > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/pciback/bind


SLOT refers to the PCI bus of the device… see if that has changed for new setup… it shouldn’t.

And to start the domU guest, start it using this:

xm create opensuse-1 pci=01:06.0 pci=01:06.1 pci=01:07.0 extra="swiotlb=force"

MythTV will detect the cards and use them.

UPDATE:
Just installed SuSE on the new production server, and the above worked flawlessly.

UPDATE:
For the mythtv-backend server, if channel names don’t come in correctly, try this:
mythfilldatabase --do-channel-updates

HARDWARE ALLOCATION
– The server machine will be an Athlon64 x2 4000+ (socket AM2)
– The server machine will have 3gigs DDR2 ram
– It will have a RAID5 array (4 drives x250gig SATA)
—– The RAID5 array is a large XFS partition. Continue reading →

I think I’ve decided that LVM disks is the way to go for ALL the virtual machines.
I just did an #hdparm -t xvda2 (root folder, which is file based) and got between 5-10MB/s
Did an #hdparm -t xvdb1 (LVM folder, which is a physical device) and got around 46-47MB/s.
It’s clear. LVM all the way! Continue reading →