Setting Up LVM Backed Xen DomU

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LVM volumes as backing for DomU’s file system is an appealing solution to Xen VBD. LVM volumes can dynamically grow/shrink and snapshot. These features make it simple and fast to duplicate DomU and adding storage to DomU. Creating LVM-backed Xen DomU is introduced in this post. Create LVM-backed VBD Suppose we have a LVM volume
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Xen DomU’s I/O Performance of LVM and loopback Backed VBDs

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This posts list benchmark (using bonnie++) result of I/O performance of Xen LVM and loopback backed VBDs. The configuration of machines Dom0 VCPU: 2 (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5520  @ 2.27GHz) Memory: 2GB Xen and Linux kernel: Xen 3.4.3 with Xenified 2.6.32.13 kernel DomU VCPU: 2 Memory: 2GB Linux kernel: Fedora (2.6.32.19-163.fc12.x86_64) DomU’s profile: name=”10.0.1.200″ vcps=2
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Setting up Stable Xen Dom0 with Fedora: Xen 3.4.3 with Xenified Linux Kernel 2.6.32.13 in Fedora 12

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This is the latest stable and recommended stable Xen Dom0 solution on Fedora 12. No serious bug found till now and we will fix the bugs by ourselves if some appears. It also works on Fedora 14 as well. It should not be hard to use this solution on other versions of Fedora or other
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Set up and Run Linux Xen Dom0 and DomU VMs

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The Xen solutions including installing and configuring Dom0 and DomU are summarized here. LVM volumes as backing for DomU’s file system is an appealing solution to Xen VBD. LVM volumes can dynamically grow/shrink and snapshot. These features make it simple and fast to duplicate DomU and adding storage to DomU. LVM backed DomU is recommended.
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Setting Up Xen DomU on Fedora Linux (Fedora 12)

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Creating file-backed virtual block device (VBD) for Xen virtual machines and installing Fedora 12 in Xen DomU via internet will be introduced. Note that this tutorial is based on a pretty old OS (Fedora 12). But the method here is still valid while some minor details may need to be changed for latest Xen and
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Setting Up Xen Dom0 on Fedora : Xen 3.4.1 with Linux Kernel 2.6.29 on Fedora 12

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Please refer to for the latest stable Xen Dom0 solution. In this post, the detailed tutorial for setting up Xen 3.4.1 dom0 on top of Fedora 12 with kernel 2.6.29 will be introduced. Hardware: Dom0 hardware platform: Motherboard: INTEL S5500BC S5500 Quad Core Xeon Server Board CPU: 2 x Intel Quad Core Xeon E5520 2.26G
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Unified Xen DomU configuration file

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Previously, we create a configuration file for each DomU virtual machines in our cluster. Most of the content in these configuration files is the same. The differences are only the name, memory size and image file address. There are several disadvantages of this method: We must create and configure a new configuration file when creating
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An I/O Performance Comparison Between loopback Backed and blktap Backed Xen File-backed VBD

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I have done some I/O performance benchmark test of Xen DomU. For easier management, some of our DomU VMs are using file-backed VBDs. Previously, our VMs are using Loopback-mounted file-backed VBDs. But blktap-based support are recommended by Xen community. Before considering changing from loopback based VBD to blktap based VBD, I have done this performance
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A Simple CPU and Memory Performance Test of Xen Dom0 and DomU

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Please refer to Setting Up Xen Dom0 on Fedora : Xen 3.4.1 with Linux Kernel 2.6.29 on Fedora 12 for the platform of this test (this test runs on Fedora 11, however). I have done some simple performance test on DomU and Dom0 and compare with the performance on physical machines. These test are simple,
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Create and Manage Virtual Machines on Xen

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In this post, these content are introduced: Create and manage file-backed virtual block device (VBD) for virtual machines on xen. Install Fedora 11 via internet as DomU on top of xen. Manage virtual machines using xm. Create file-backed VBD: The actual space of VBD will be the amount of disk the virtual machine used. And
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How to Run a cron Job Every Two Weeks / Months / Days

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We may want to run some jobs for every two weeks/months/days… under some situation such as backing up for every other week. In addition, we may add more complex rules for running jobs, e.g. run a command when the load of the server is higher than a certain level. With the help of the shell
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Reading List for Distributed Systems and Cloud Computing

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Understanding the literature is usually the first step to do research, which is the same for systems research on cloud computing. A reading list may help a lot to those that just start in cloud computing research. Prof. Lin Gu, my PhD supervisor, compiled a reading list for system research on cloud computing. The reading
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