[CentOS-virt] Xen version

Thu Dec 16 17:32:35 UTC 2010
Eric Searcy <emsearcy at gmail.com>

On Dec 16, 2010, at 1:01 AM, Paul Piscuc wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> We are thinking of using CentOS with XEN in production, but we are facing some issues regarding the 3.0.3 version of the xen hypervisor and windows paravirtualization. The drivers we are using are from here (http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenWindowsGplPv). The solution we found is upgrading to xen 3.4.2, using a strange repository (gitco.de), and everything seems to work. Now the question is: would you recomand using the 3.0.3 kernel provided by CentOS in production and searching for other paravirtualization drivers, or go with 3.4.2? Is this version of the hypervisor stable?

While gitco isn't really that "strange" (as I'm pretty sure its widely deployed judging from comments on this list) I've never got around to upgrading to it.  I've got more than a dozen Windows VMs: XP, 2003 32 and 64 bit, all running on 3.0.3 (actually is Xen 3.1.2 with 3.0.3 dom0 tools on el5.5, check your "xm dmesg" output).

Anyhow, it's been stable "enough" for me, currently on version 0.10.0.142 of the GPL PV drivers.  Actually I don't use it for my production stuff either, but since in my experience it's significantly faster than other virt platforms, we use it where I feel is appropriate.  Here's my one exception: one of my boxes (was XP) would keep blue-screening (irql_not_less_than_or_equal (sp?) ), another one of our sysadmins located it to be an issue with the on-demand/live virus scanner software; switched to a different product and the problem went away.  I also had another different XP box have the same error for awhile back in early 2009 and that arrived and went away with upgrades of xen on the host.  But in the last two years I've never had issue with Server 2003, or (very limited use) 2008.

Eric
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