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Xen and Bridging

In a default configuration of Xen there will be a virtual Ethernet device created for each interface which will be associated with a bridge. A previous post documented how to configure a bridge named xenbr0.

The basic configuration of Xen that most people use is to have a single virtual Ethernet port for each Xen […]

Modules and NFS for Xen

I’m just in the process of converting a multi-user system to a Xen DomU. It was running on a stand-alone Fedora Core 5 i386 system and I want to run it on a Fedora 7 DomU under a CentOS 5 Dom0 on an Opteron system.

The first stage of the conversion was to copy an […]

Bizarre “No space left on device” error from Xen

What should have been a routine “remove DIMMs and run memtest until things work” procedure to solve a memory error became a lot more complex due to poor error handling in Xen.

The following error occured because the tdb database /var/lib/xenstored/tdb was corrupt. To fix it you must rm the file and kill the xenstored […]

Xen and Heartbeat

Xen (a system for running multiple virtual Linux machines) and has some obvious benefits for testing Heartbeat (the clustering system) – the cheapest new machine that is on sale in Australia can be used to simulate a four node cluster. I’m not sure whether there is any production use for a cluster running under Xen […]

first look at CentOS 5 Xen

I have just installed a machine running CentOS 5 as a Xen server. I installed a full GUI environment on the dom0 so that GUI tools can be used for managing the virtual servers.

The first problem I had was selecting the “Installation source”, it’s described in the error message as an “Invalid PV media […]

Xen and eth device renaming

Recently I rebooted one of my Debian Xen servers and suddenly all the Ethernet devices which used to be eth0 in the domU’s became eth1.

vif = [ ”, ‘bridge=xenbr1’ ]

I used to have the above as the interface definition and for domU’s that had only a single interface that worked well (if there […]

xen sucks

According to Debian bug #399113 and linked discussion it is impossible to run a stable system on Xen without enabling PAE. It seems that no-one is considering the fact that a hypervisor that runs on both 32bit and 64bit architectures should be able to support 32bit systems with <4G of RAM (IE not using the […]

Xephyr

As part of my work on Xen I’ve been playing with Xephyr (a replacement for Xnest). My plan is to use Xen instances for running different versions of desktop environments. You can’t just ssh -X to a Xen image and run things. One problem is that some programs such as Firefox do strange things to […]

Xen shared storage

disk = [ ‘phy:/dev/vg/xen1,hda,w’, ‘phy:/dev/vg/xen1-swap,hdb,w’, ‘phy:/dev/vg/xen1-drbd,hdc,w’, ‘phy:/dev/vg/san,hdd,w!’ ]

For some work that I am doing I am trying to simulate a cluster that uses fiber channel SAN storage (among other things). The above is the disk line I’m using for one of my cluster nodes, hda and hdb are the root and swap disks for […]

multiple ethernet devices in Xen

It seems that no-one has documented what needs to be done to correctly run multiple Ethernet devices (with one always being eth0 and the other always being eth1) in a Linux Xen configuration (or if it is documented then google wouldn’t find it for me).

vif = [ ‘mac=00:16:3e:00:01:01’, ‘mac=00:16:3e:00:02:01, bridge=xenbr1’ ]

Firstly I use […]