Tag Archives: centos

Xen, LVM, and Grub

I ran into an interesting problem with my new server the other day.

Due to a hardware problem with an external USB hard drive, I had to reboot the XEN host.

I had to do the reboot remotely … so I couldn’t intervene if something went wrong.  Yes, you guessed it, something did go wrong.

When I finally got home I found the system trying to boot ‘bree’ … which is one of the XEN guest machines.

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CentOS Upgrade

Well, I’m pretty pleased with CentOS so far.

I just completed a minor version upgrade (5.5 to 5.6) via yum and it went very smoothly.  This involved 3 virtual guest and one host (the guests run inside the host).

I had one small glitch with the RPM database on middle-earth.  Some dependencies were screwed up, but that was corrected by running yum clean all.

In order to speed things up, I’m going to be mirroring the most current CentOS package repository on middle-earth … that way I can get the updates done much quicker (installs too).

Of course I still have to move a bunch of the applications to the virtual machine’s.  I think I’m close to being able to retire gondor.  Moving rivendell is going to a major effort.

Virtualization Advice

I need some virtualization advice.

I’m currently running this blog, among others, on XEN 3.1.2 based virtualization on CentOS 5.5.

At the present time, I have three physical machines running … rivendell, gondor, and middle-earth.

Middle-earth”is the XEN host.

Rivendell and gondor are stand alone servers running Fedodra 10.

Currently gondor is primarily a web server and backup mail delivery server.

Rivendell is the main system and acts as a NIS server, MySQL server, samba file server, chat server, mail server, etc.

My goal is to migrate all the functions from rivendell & gondor to XEN instances on middle-earth.

My questions relate to where to run services, file systems, and processor allocation.

Specifically …

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