Re: [gentoo-user] Pay for a hardened VM image

[Pandu Poluan]

On Mar 4, 2012 11:17 PM, "Tanstaafl" <tanstaafl@×××××××××××.org> wrote:
>
>
> What are peoples opinions of ESXi? The guys I'm considering using are
perfect for everything else, but they only have experience with Microsoft
Hyper-V and ESXi. I don't think they have *any* experience with Xen on
Linux, but I dunno about XenServer (I'll find out)...
>

ESXi is good enough. It's a 'jack of all trades', runs everything Good
Enough™, but gets expensive in the long run. Plus, its hypervisor is
heavier than Hyper-V and Xen/XenServer, although not by much.

XenServer runs Linux guests extremely well; ever since 2.6.38 IIRC, all
paravirtual knobs are part of the kernel. This enables the highest
performance possible for a guest Linux VM. Windows performance is
acceptable; the PV drivers help a lot. It's not perfect, but still
acceptable by all measurements.

Hyper-V is still struggling to make Linux VMs run well; requisite drivers
for running Linux in paravirtual mode just recently got pulled into Linus's
tree. IMO, it won't be ready for production Linux VMs until 2013, or late
2012 at the earliest.

One 'trick' when making VMs under VMware: the VMXnet subsystem, although at
first sounds like it will be a boost to performance (paravirtual device),
is not really stable; I've heard lots of grief. Just provide a bog-standard
emulated e1000 for the guest VMs.

>
> On 2012-03-03 10:55 PM, Pandu Poluan <pandu@××××××.info> wrote:
> > On Mar 4, 2012 8:13 AM, "Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera (klondike)"
> > <klondike@g.o <mailto:klondike@g.o>> wrote:
> >> El 04/03/12 01:26, Michael Orlitzky escribió:
> >> Or maybe he should just ask on gentoo-hardened where many other users
> >> including paid ones roam.
>
> > Or gentoo-server. After all, Hyper-V is currently aimed for server
> > environs, so the server guys should have better ideas.
> >
> > (disclosure: I'm a server guy, but unfortunately have no experience
> > at all with Hyper-V; my infrastructure runs exclusively on Xen)
>
> Hi Pandu,
>
> At first I thought you meant Xen proper, but as I was googling about
Xen/XenServer+Gentoo I stumbled on this blog post of yours from about 7
months ago:
>
>
http://pepoluan.posterous.com/finally-gentoo-pv-on-xenserver-without-initrd
>
> So - are you using Xen? Or Citrix's XenServer?
>

Well, both *are* based on the exact same Xen hypervisor. The differences
between pure Xen and XenServer: Citrix provided a CentOS-based dom0 that's
guaranteed to Just Works™, and Citrix also provides mature management tools
(Windows-based) that will greatly ease the management of your VMs and
pools. Plus, one gets "premium-level" support from Citrix.

That last bit of difference was the key deciding factor of my BoD.

FYI, Citrix XenServer Standard Edition is 100% gratis, so you can "take it
out for a spin" first. Upgrading from the Standard Edition to the
non-gratis Enterprise Edition or Platinum Edition is a simple matter of
importing a "License Server VM" (image freely downloadable from Citrix) and
putting the license file in that License Server.

> Do you have any experience running virtualized Microsoft Servers on Xen
(or XenServer)?
>

I've successfully deployed the following OSes on XenServer for production:
Windows 2003, Windows 2008, Gentoo Linux Hardened, Ubuntu Server, and
Debian stable

The dev boxen also ran rPath Linux (part of OpenFiler), Windows XP SP3,
Windows 7, and FreeBSD.

> If so, would you be interested in some contract work (if so, please
contact me directly)...
>

Well, I'd like to help, but currently I'm transitioning to a new employer,
and there's a fuckload of things and know-hows that I have to 'transfer' to
my successors in the next two weeks :-\

Rgds,