Steve Blinkhorn a écrit :
I am contemplating configuring a box from scratch to run Xen with NetBSD and Windows guests. Apart from hardware virtualisation support, which I take to be essential, are there other processor features which are particularly [dis]advantageous - number of cores, amounts of cache etc.? Any other advice, known gotchas etc. that would be useful to someone with long experience in the *nix world, but new to Xen?
I doubt that there are drivers for windows guests to run smoothly as an NetBSD/XEN HVM guest. I did that about 5 years ago and I had to type F5 during the installation process, at the beginning, to enable the very bare/default/standard windows drivers. It was an 2000 or a 2003 server I think. Probably 2003. As far as I can remember Novell had some drivers for that but I doubt those have been made available for others. Check the performance but it might be quite poor. Things may have evolved in the mean time, though.
Red Hat has some drivers for windows KVM guests, donno if those are available for CentOS.
appart from vt and svm there's no absolute prerequesite and it's of course preferable to have as much cores as possible considering the number of guests which will share those. For the cache and frequency I guess it's the same as for a standard machine, but of course you should have lots of RAM.
to me and for some time the issue about NetBSD/XEN was that there was no sparse file support. vnconfig prevents it in the first place, donno if the filesystem itselfs allows it. does it ? and considering multi-node and live-migration, there was no shared disk file system appart from obscure options like OpenAFS (kerberos...) or Coda which I never tried. There is now glusterfs in pkgsrc/filesystems. otherwise there's always NFS.