SoftElegance has successfully lanced XEN 4.0.0 on OpenSUSE 11.3 on Intel® Server System SR2600URBRP Server. The Server configuration is Intel Quad Xeon E5630, 12Gb of RAM, and MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i.
The main goal was to create virtual machines on this server to run MS SQL Server 2008 and TFS 2010. So we’ve created following OS:
- Windows Server 2008 RC2 with both MS SQL Server 2008 and MS SQL Server 2008 R2 to run different database instances for specific project’s requirements;
- Windows Server 2008 RC2 to run TFS 2010;
- FreeBSD 8.1 for other needs.
Problem:
The General issues that could be a bottleneck for virtualizing are:
- system bus speed;
- adding new HDDs;
- increasing the RAM.
About Xen:
The Xen hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization, offers a powerful, efficient, and secure feature set for virtualization of x86, x86_64, IA64, ARM, and other CPU architectures.
The Xen hypervisor is a layer of software running directly on computer hardware replacing the
operating system thereby allowing the computer hardware to run multiple guest operating systems concurrently.
Conclusion:
Using Xen 4.0 we’ve avoided possible troubles with disk spaces and RAM capacity. This was critical tasks for running several database instances on Windows Server 2008.
Also see the official documentation how to install XEN 4.0