[wellylug] Xen and Windows

[Peter Lambrechtsen]

On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 9:33 PM, William Hamilton <
william.hamilton at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am looking at putting some time into Xen as a couple of clients are
> making noises about virtualisation blah blah.  Having had a quick read I see
> that Windows is not greatly supported unless the processor has
> virtualisation built in.
> Anyone here doing a mix of Linux/Windows on Xen? (one particular client has
> a Windows app they cannot get rid of at this stage).  Any recomendations on
> hardware?  A number of my boxes are SuperMicro 1U and 2U which I have had
> good experiences with.
>
>
I installed a few XEN VM's on a Intel blade system running SLES at 3 schools
in wellington.  One of them have a 6 Blade IBM Enclosure, another has a 2
blade, the last just has a Intel no-name 1U server which has a Xeon VT CPU
in it.  They run windows just fine as they all are VT cpus.  There is the
Novell windows drivers which you can download for free which speeds things
up a lot in the VM from the Novell site, if you want the Windows signed
versions you need to pay Novell for them, but the unsigned ones work fine
for me.

I still prefer VMWare Server, but we put in a 6 node cluster, all runnins
XEN with OCFS for the filesystem, and with 8 SLES Linux VM Guests, since all
of the boxes supported VT, it made sense to also load 2 Windows guests on
them as well.

If the servers you have are not Intel Xeon server class CPUs or don't
support VT or the AMD equliviant Hyper-V then VMWare server / ESXi is the
way to go.  Or you could go down the Virtual Box path.

Thanks

Peter
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