Xen4Centos

[RobertFontaine]

I'm preparing the sandbox for my xeon phi's. A bit of a do everything basement server/workstation/number cruncher. 2 8 core e5's - 64gb of ram, a couple of xeon phis to start and ssd for boot, swap and vms. As I add machines and seperate dis,k and development from compute I will migrate the vms as my wallet can handle it.

4-6 occasional remote developers, 2-3 concurrent development/research projects, seperate operating environments for each. lamp, router, mail, all small. windows(various), linux centos for phi. Math/Machine Learning/Data Mining/Parallel programming practice in general (or rather in the specific

I think I want a proper hypervisor/network environment so I can keep littering to a minimum and I will be opening up ports to the real world so I'd also like to put up a few fences.

As I will be using CentOS or Fedora on the linux environments CentOS is tempting as a core OS for Xen.
Does it actually matter ? Is Xen4Centos a good idea or should I be using some other distribution as the basis for my sandbox? CentOS seems like a solid, reliable, stable... etc... but it's not clear to me whether the same can be said for Xen4Centos.

Not trying for a religious debate. Good enough is good enough. If it's not a stupid thing to do then it is at least an easy and consistent thing to do.


Thanks
Robert

 

[Blinky 42]

I used to use the one packaged by some EU university (would have to look it up) but now use the one that is built in to Centos and it works just fine. The "yum install centos-release-xen" and then add packages from there.
HowTos/Xen/Xen4QuickStart - CentOS Wiki

Does fine on older or newer hardware and seems supported well. I am using it in production at multiple sites and for development as well.

 

[Chuckleb]

Any issues passing the phi through to virtualized environments?

 

[RobertFontaine01]

Any issues passing the phi through to virtualized environments?

Excellent question... I believe you can assign hardware explicitly but not share. Will do a bit more reading.

 

[RobertFontaine01]

Excellent question... I believe you can assign hardware explicitly but not share. Will do a bit more reading.

And the answer is good to go w xen (or esxi if that happens to be your flavour. Steps are on the Intel site.