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xen-devel
Re: [Xen-devel] Hacking XenEnterprise / Please Help
On Fri, 6 Jul 2007, Jim Burnes wrote:
We need the following features in Xen and we're trying to figure out the
best way to acquire them.
1. Full virtualization of Windows XP
OK.
2. Shared Windows boot image with copy-on-write backing storage after boot.
Interesting. You don't expect a ton of changes to the Windows image, I'm
guessing?
3. Ability to shut down a Windows VM and examine the copy-on-write file store
for data written to the drive.
OK.
4. High-performance hyper-virtualized Windows drivers
OK.
Our Problem
The most direct solutions to this problem seems to be:
1. XenEnterprise with it's hyper-virtualized Windows drivers and using
QCOW files for copy-on-write file store.
Except my experimentation with 3.1.0 last week showed me that there's a
bug that prevents blk:tap I/O (which qcow uses) from working correctly
with fully virtualized domains. I did see the patch and would be willing
to use it against the 3.1.0 source tree except that I don't know if I
can even make that drastic of a modification to a XenEnterprise install.
Post on the forum - see if they will fix it for you.
The other XenEnterprise possibility is to bypass blk:tap and simply use
LVM snapshots as copy-on-write images. This works on RHEL 5, but
XenEnterprise didn't have a required kernel feature enabled to allow it.
That means I would need to modify the XenEnterprise kernel to enable the
feature or go back and hack the version of Xen to allow blk:tap.
Ditto. If you buy XE+support, they would very likely be willing to work
with you on this.
In either case, it's a significant modification of a turnkey package.
2. RHEL 5/Centos 5 with the updated XenSource 3.1.0 RPMs.
I had this running pretty well. The device mapper in the XenSource
3.1.0 kernel for RHEL 5 allowed LVM snapshot copy-on-writes and I could
probably use the blk:tap patch if I didn't mind recompiling the Xen
kernel.
Unfortunately we can't use the hypervirtualized windows drivers unless
we're running XenEnterprise.
There are also the SuSE drivers coming available soon. They would let you
run the open source version of Xen with Paravirt drivers, as I understand
it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
| nate carlson | natecars@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx | http://www.natecarlson.com |
| depriving some poor village of its idiot since 1981 |
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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