A few months ago I got my hands on a new server at work. It’s a Dell PowerEdge 2950. I was going to post a link but it seems Dell is having some problems with their website and half of the links I find in Google do not work.
The server has a Quad Core Xeon CPU E5440 and 4 GB of RAM. The storage needs are covered by a MD1000 disk array connected to a Perc5/E controller. The controller supports different RAID configurations: 0, 1, 10 and 50. I’ve tried most of them plus different combinations of software raid and hardware plus software raid. In the end I’ve settled on RAID-5 on 3 disks.
As the operating system I’ve installed CentOS 5.1 which is basically a free copy of RHEL 5.1. It comes with Xen 3.0.3 and of course I’ve installed that too. I want to convert the existing servers we have at work to Xen guests and have them running on this new machine. This will let me update OS on all the servers to the same version without bringing the whole office to halt. And once the servers are virtualized it will be much easier to deal with maintenance of the physical servers. Maybe I will even set up some cluster to host all these Xen guests. I didn’t have time to fully explore this idea but it sounds like it could offer further advantages.
So far I was able to convert one physical server to a virtual one with rather short downtime. I followed the instructions described in my Xen p2v post. The virtual server has been running fine for several months already. In terms of performance there are no problems – it helps that the Xen host has more powerful hardware and this server doesn’t need much I/O.
Besides this P2V conversion I’ve also created a Xen guest with Fedora Core 8 to run our CruiseControl server. The previous installation was running on a Fedora Core 5 host. I’ve used the occasion and upgraded CruiseControl to the latest version. Installing CruiseControl took me a long time. Mostly because I couldn’t find proper instructions. I’ve tried few different ones from the CruiseControl website, from IBM and some others. Unfortunately I just couldn’t get it to work. So in the end I’ve just duplicated the setup we had before. It’s not perfect but it works and I don’t want to spend a week on that.
Third Xen guest I’ve created is a very small installation of CentOS 5.1 running with only 64 MB of RAM. It serves as a license server for some applications we use. I’ve minimized the amount of the services running to reduce the memory footprint and the virtual machine uses only 41 MB of RAM.
So far all three guests are running nicely together. I’ll be adding more of them in the future.
