[Ukfreebsd] Hosted FreeBSD Servers

Juggler Doug chudleydog at gmail.com
Sun Mar 11 21:01:16 GMT 2012


At the moment - it doesn't offer me the ability to do the XEN equivalent of
vmotion - so basically the only way to move from machine to machine is to
shutdown the VM and start it up again.

I've read the information about PV kernels - as you say, don't really want
to go there - am wanting to be able to offer FreeBSD to more than just
techie clients -- i.e to be able to offer it as an alternative for web
hosting etc.

Also noted a few comments on various mailing lists about getting people
interested in integrating - it would be great and we are willing to wait it
out - and see if the development path comes good...

Thanks ever so much for your help - we will talk amongst ourselves and with
the sales team and see if we can deliver the service as is.

/b

On 11 March 2012 10:29, Robert N. M. Watson <rwatson at freebsd.org> wrote:

>
> On 10 Mar 2012, at 20:47, Juggler Doug wrote:
>
> > I working for a company moving into hosted services in Sweden (I'm
> English
> > now living in the land of the Elk and Abba).
> >
> > Its a bit of a niche market I know, but I am interested in offering
> FreeBSD
> > servers as part of the portfolio (dreadful word that).
> >
> > Question is - a FreeBDS 9 install works just fine on XEN - but of course
> no
> > tools - so its sort of half the game - I'm searching the inter'web'o'net
> > for any instructions - but seems to be a dead end at the moment.
> >
> > Any thoughts on this - any way of getting so that machines can be
> migrated
> > from XEN server to XEN server - otherwise I'm going to be stuck with
> > offering 99.5% availability (or whatever number one calculates from one
> > piece of hardware).
> >
> > Would also be interested in how much interest there is on the list - in
> > getting access to FreeB 9 servers...
> >
> > Thanks ever so much for your time in reading and any insights you may
> have
>
>
> Are you actually running into issues migrating FreeBSD from server to
> server on Xen? I had a problem with this last year on our local Xen server
> pool but we never really tracked it down. That pool runs quite an old
> version of Xen, and we also weren't convinced it wasn't a CPU issue.
>
> FreeBSD has PV device drivers you can compile into the kernel, but that
> requires custom-compiled kernels -- something we'd like to avoid requiring
> if we can, since that breaks freebsd-update on the kernel. I know it's on
> several people's todo lists to make it so that the PV drivers can simply be
> loaded as with any other device driver. Another possibility would be to add
> a Xen kernel config that's also built/installable that freebsd-update can
> manage.
>
> A final thought: there is quite active work on FreeBSD dom0 support from
> US companies using Xen in their products. I'd expect to see announcements
> in that area soon. As those companies are using FreeBSD on Xen heavily
> (e.g., in storage appliances, hosting, etc), we should continue to see
> improvements for HVM and PV guests as well.
>
> Robert
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