[Xen-users] preferred hardware for xen?

["Gabor Szokoli" <szocske@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

We are a small sw development company, making a nish product which
runs on dedicated HW in production environments. We normaly ship with
debian on 32 bit smp x86, like 1U IBM eservers.
For internal testing purposes however, our developers need to run
dosens of instances independently, so we have bigger servers
virtualised apart.

We would like to migrate away from vmware, and are experimenting with
xen currently. Because we use two of our older p4 servers for xen
tests, we can be convinced to blame the recurring "soft lockup
detected" incidents on it. We get it consistently under high load.

My question is thus twofold:

1, What's up with the "soft lockup" kernel panic thing? I see it
mentioned all over the 'net, multiple bugs open, but have not found
any writeup or explanation to what it really is, and how development
on avoiding it is going. All I could figure out from the source is
that the guest domain kernel panics in relation to not being scheduled
on all CPUs within 10 seconds. I can understand this is trouble in a
regular OS, but a virtual one should instead be happy to experience
such CPU affinity, no?
We currently run 3.0.2+hg9697-0, kernel 2.6.16-2-xen-686 #1 SMP,
debian stable + libc6-xen from testing.

2, We plan to purchase a few new servers to slice up. Should we look
for something with vanderpool? Pacifica? Anything else we should
insist on to increase the probablility of xen working on it fine?
Anything we should make sure is not in them? More or fewer CPUs/cores
the better?


Thanks for any tips or advice:

Gabor Szokoli

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