XenSource v4 XenServer

So we got our 1 month eval license for XenServer and I just installed it on this Dell PowerEdge 2950 with dual quad-cores, 8 GB of RAM, and about 1.5 TB's of storage we had lying around. The install of XenServer was pretty boring: click, click, click, reboot, done (which, of course, is a good thing). The thing I really wanted to check out was their XenCenter Management client. The one bad thing is that it needs to run on Windows. I have a virtualized XP VM running via Parallels on my MacBook so it wasn't too big of a deal I guess.

The XenCenter interface looks like a typical Microsoft MMC plug-in. It was pretty simple to figure out how to do basic things like create new VMs, create Storage Repositories (this is an NFS share on the XenServer and I'm planning on storing all the VMs here to play with XenMotion), check the performance stats for the XenServer and its guests, configure network interfaces, etc. I have to say, so far this is looking pretty good for Xen. That was my one big beef with Xen versus VMware...their GUI was practically non-existent. I know some of you hardcore UNIX guys are scoffing right now. I don't mind the command-line...for most purposes I'll probably end up using it exclusively...but GUIs have their place like when you have multiple XenServers running multiple XenGuests and you want to do things to a subset of hosts.

I'm going to create several VMs (like 6 web servers and 2 database servers) and then load our site on them. Then we'll put them behind the load balancers and maybe run some load tests. It'd be nice to see how easily we can XenMotion VMs off of one physical server to simulate some kind of scheduled maintenance, and what impact a user would experience during the process.