[Xen-users] Need advice regarding distro

[Dana Rawding <dana@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

I need some advice.  I have been running Xen under Ubuntu LTS 8.0.4 for about 
18 months.  The original install gave me the 2.6.24-19-xen kernel.
There were a couple of updates and all my machines are currently running 
2.6.24-23-xen.  Since Ubuntu decided to go with KVM I imagine that there will 
be no further updates.

Recently I had read that in the future Remus is going to be added to the 
kernel.  HA is very desirable for me as I have a number of HA web servers that 
I handle with load balancing in front of virtualized images spread over 
multiple servers.  The addition of synchronized failover images would be huge!  
So I started looking around at other distros that are going to continue to 
support Xen.  I downloaded the latest OpenSuSE and installed on a spare HP 
DL380.  I was able to get it up and running on 2.6.31.5-0.1-xen.  After testing 
for a few days I decided to start upgrading my production machines.  

To take a step back for a moment, my server farm consists of mostly HP DL380 
G3's with 8 GB of RAM and dual 3.06 GHz Xeons.  I also have a couple of HP 
DL580 with 32 GB RAM and Quad Xeons.  While this gear is not the latest and 
greatest they are real workhorses and I have a lot of them.  They run mostly 
mail, web, dns, etc.  No desktops or Windows so PV is fine.

So I decided to upgrade one of the DL580's.  The install seems to go OK but 
upon restart it continuously hangs when bringing up the BR1 interface.  I 
installed the standard kernel and the interfaces come up fine.  Furthermore I 
added an additional gigabit Broadcom based HP Ethernet card.  I got it 
configured as eth2 and again it works fine with the non Xen kernel.  Even if I 
disable the onboard eth1 and assign br1 to eth2 it continues to hang on boot.  
Frustrated after two days of messing around I installed SuSE on a brand new IBM 
x3500 M2 w/ dual Xeon 2.66 GHz X5550 4C's.  Again the install went fine.  
However almost daily the box just completely hangs.  I can't seem to find any 
log entries to figure out why this is happening.  I can create a hang by just 
untarring a large file in either the DomU or a DomO.  Plenty of memory and free 
processors so I don't know why it continues to die.

As you can guess my current experience with SuSE has left a bad taste in my 
mouth on both old and new hardware.  I was about to download Fedora and go it 
again but before spending the time I thought I'd ask the opinion of the list as 
to what they would do/recommend.  My gut tells me to just bit the bullet and 
start compiling my own kernels and stay with Ubuntu.  Ideas, comments, 
suggestions?

Thanks,
Dana
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