Manuel Wolfshant wolfy@nobugconsulting.ro writes:

On 10/18/2008 02:38 PM, Karanbir Singh wrote:

...

I was wondering if there was any interest in prebuilt Xen images as well ?

for me a minimal system would be enough. But by minimal I mean only vi and yum functional. Nothing else. Especially not the dozens of packages brought in by @base.

I second this. Two reasons. First, many Xen providers have very small 'super cheap' packages. (mine only has 64M ram for the smallest, and at one point only included a gig of disk, though I have upped that.)

the second reason is that doing an altroot install is pretty trivial once you have a centos system up and running, but having a paravirt image I can just download and use is pretty convienient.

and in support of distributing 'official' CentOS images, well, CentOS is in a position to make a 'standard image format' that many providers could use, decreasing customer lock-in (increasing value for the customers.)

I would be very interested in helping this project if there is a possibility of it becoming 'centos official' - I've worked some with jailtime.org, but the problem really is one of trust, and CentOS (and the other distros) have alrealdy solved that. If you are using a distro, you alrealdy trust them, so a distro-distributed xen image has a compelling advantage over other images provided by a third party.

I believe the differences between a Xen image and a vmware image are pretty trivial. grub, and kernel vs kernel-xen, and if it's 32-bit, the xen image needs echo "hwcap 0 nosegneg" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/nosegneg.conf or so. I guess the vmware image needs the vmware tools (if vmware will let you distribute them) but pretty trivial.

Speaking of competitors, once we have an 'official' image, I'd like to see it uploaded as a 'shared AMI' to amazon EC2. There should be a way to mark the ami as 'blessed' by the CentOS team.