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Xen Garden: Tales of server management via virtualization from The Marsh
Linh Vu
Abstract
The Marsh: a server room inundated with gray towers and old desktops masquerading as servers surrounding the quality rackmounts, which provides the perfect climate for the wild growth of various operating systems and applications with undocumented and often mismanaged configurations.
Xen Garden: a server room with a lot of breathing space and rackmounted servers, which are paravirtualized with Xen technology to best utilize hardware resources and partition servers into more manageable XenVMs (virtual machines), and to bring serenity into the life of a system administrator.
The wilderness of The Marsh is a sight that system administrators have seen too many times in their days and sometimes nightmares. Inheriting The Marsh from my predecessors and having added to its growth myself, I knew I had to stop its expansion and take back the control before it consumes me. This paper explains the problems stemming from The Marsh and why I chose Xen virtualization technology as the solution. It demonstrates the use cases for Xen at my workplace, how a Xen Garden is managed and some future plans with this newfound flexibility.
Presenter Biography
Linh Vu works as the system and web administrator at the Physics Department of the University of Melbourne. He is at the cowboy stage of the SDLC - Sysadmin Development Life Cycle - meaning he loves to explore new cool technologies, preferably with catchy names like web-two-point-oh, and sneakily apply them in production before they pass rigorous enterprise quality testing for mission-critical spaceship launchers. Linh presented at the SAGE-AU 2006 Conference in Canberra on Apache security.