I've been meaning to try out Xen, as a replacement for User Mode Linux for a while. As you may know, we offer "virtual dedicated" system hosting using User Mode Linux, but UML has not really been being updated for the last 6 months. Xen has a lot more interested these days, and it's going to be included in the next Fedora release. It's pretty slick stuff, and even has a mode where it can migrate a live, running virtual machine between systems.

So, today while I was out at the coffee shop, and while doing other work I fired up qemu (as kevin mentioned in his previous posting), installed CentOS Server (the only single-ISO system I had available on my laptop), installed and set up Xen, and then fired up a Xen on a Fedora Core 3 disc image. It was pretty silly, but did work relatively nicely.

Now, qemu's performance is not stellar, being an emulator, but it was good enough for me to get some experience with Xen. It looks pretty promising, but I was only able to get so far in that setup. I had done a software suspend, and on resume the qemu+Xen system was very unhappy. I did a reboot on the qemu system, but then networking wouldn't come up, possibly due to some corruption. I had really hoped to try the networking between the two machines, but without the network on the qemu system that wasn't going to happen.

I'm now comfortable enough with it that I'm going to try it on a real system now. This was made harder because the only real systems I've got available to test it out on right now are at our server facility, and so they're less convenient to fix if I muck something up.
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