TechAgility

So while attending Citrix’s iForum I had the opportunity to examine
XenServer in more detail at one of the booths and I was pleasantly surprised as to the level of detail and how it appeared to be pretty straight forward. However the main issue would appear to be that there is no equivalent to VMware’s Workstation that makes it possible to run Demo’s and the like directly from a Laptop.

So in chatting to one of the freshly minted "Citrix" Xen Tech’s looking after the booth he did confirm that there is currently no "Workstation" alternative, however one of the Citrix SE’s that I chatted to did mention that the alternative at the moment (leaving room for a Workstation edition soon no doubt?) is to either use a separate Laptop that has Xen Server installed or they use Virtual PC as a host for the Xen Server.

So seeing as I received a XenExpress Demo in the goodies bag I have taken the liberty of installing Xen on a VM inside VMware Workstation 6, and even though Xen insists on being installed on x64 hardware it was pretty easy – I just selected Other Linux 2.6.x Kernel 64-bit and away we went – the only other caveats that I discovered (without reading any of the docs) was it really wanted to see a min. of 16Gb of HDD and at least  1Gb of RAM, but other than that it was a piece of cake.

Once the Server has been built it will return with the IP address listed in the console, at this point you simply need to install the Console and then point it at the Server’s IP address and you are good to go?

I would suggest that looking through the install screenshot’s that choosing RedHat would be equally valid?

I’m sure this would install just as easily on Virtual PC or Virtual Server, but the main issue will be the extra resources needed to run a Virtual Host as well as Xen before actually being in the position to run anything meaningful?

written by dcaddick