Concepts in the Paradox

Since I’m going to be fairly busy this week, I’m going to go ahead and “officially launch” my two blogs ahead of Sept.1 launch date:

First:

LastMuni, the San Francisco transportation blog. You can add this blog as a Livejournal friend to read updates on your Livejournal friendslist: LastMuni syndication feed

Second:

XenJournal, the open source virtualization blog. You can add this blog as a Livejournal friend to read updates on your Livejournal friendslist: XenJournal syndication feed

On other projects, my thesis project is a go again. This is process suspension between virtual machines in a cluster, the idea being to pause unwanted processes that talk over tcp and resume them at a later time.

I have two more projects in the pipeline, one will be an NLP blog in about 6-8 months and the other is a “Muni survival guide”. If any one wants to help me with the MSG, let me know and I’ll add you to the wiki for edits.

After some phone calls and emails with sales and support, I managed to get my site at work enrolled in the Xen Enterprise closed beta. This means I’ll get support for free during the beta, and I’ll be a leg up come release time. They ask 10 hours a week, my work-allocated time to VT research, plus a 45 minute phone call at the end of the week. My boss was pretty happy about it, and I’m pretty happy about it, because I really think this Xen stuff will take off. Open source + Hypervisor = past and future for computing.

Target:

SLES9 x86-64 on Sun Fire x4200. This is their officially supported version, so this works for me. Later I plan to move to Pacifica when it becomes available from Sun.

I’ve started my work toward learning more about the open source virtualization software known as Xen. My target is Xen 3.0, or Xen-unstable as it is called, which I will evetually deploy as a production system at work.

Here is where I am at so far:

OpenSuSE 10 RC1’s packages don’t work properly. This is unfortunate, because I work at a Novell shop. The problem I am having are:

1. While the Xen kernel is installed at booting, new domains hang

2. Stopping a hung DomU hangs xend
3. Only rebooting clears hung DomU’s from memory

This is a problem dealing with both the OpenSuSE yast2 created images and from pulling a SLES9 image from the imaging server. I’m going to try QEMU packages from FreeOsZoo next.

Giving up on OpenSuSE for now, I pulled down Fedora Core 4 with updated Xen packages. The main bug here is that Xend doesn’t work out of the box; you’ll have to make some magical directories in /var for it to start up, otherwise it’ll go on and on about a missing file or directory.

mkdir /var/run/xenstore /var/lib/xenstore

I’m glad I archive the xen-users mailing list. Grep is my friend. The Wiki is useful too.

The next step is to try to bring up a DomU once I pull down my SLES9 image again. If it works in FC4, then I’ll play in FC4 until the next milestone in OpenSuSE is out and about or try and fail again to pull xen-unstable from cvs.