oVirt hosted engine with zfs storage

My home lab is undergoing a bit of a shift, as I experiment with different management interfaces for a virtualised server farm.  Its all the fault of my Supermicro X9DRH-7F, which is running as a separate home lab with currently 128GB of memory, as I’m exploring ways to make my home server more complex, but…

Fedora setup as Xen host

History I’ve been running Xen since something like 2008, originally on an AMD Athlon X2 dual-core, when Paravirtual installs were the only option as hardware virtualisation wasn’t a thing yet.  Obviously I’m bloody-minded 🙂  These days, virtual machines are much easier to do, but I still like to push boundaries, and for the last 3…

pfSense 2.2 beta works with Xen

After a quick test install of pfSense 2.2’s beta image (dated 1017 – I see there are two newer builds up since then), I’m pleased to report that Xen support works with pfSense 2.2 without rebuilding it!  yay! iso image here:  http://snapshots.pfsense.org/FreeBSD_releng/10.1/amd64/pfSense_HEAD/livecd_installer/?C=M;O=D I’ve been running a build of pfSense 2.1 I built over a year…

Fedora virtualization setup as Xen dom0

In my previous blog post about choosing the right dom0, I came to the conclusion that in the face of an upcoming RHEL7 which is based on Fedora 19/20, it made sense to set up my dom0 for using Fedora 20. Given the similarity between Fedora 20 and RHEL7, it should be the same process…

freeNAS 9.2 ISO with Xen PVHVM support

Update 2/10/2014:  A new build updating the files to FreeNAS 9.2.1.8 which includes a bunch of samba updates, and importantly, the fixes for the bash shellshock vulnerability. Update 17/5/2014:  I’ve replaced the links on this page to a newer version, FreeNAS 9.2.1.5, and added the Upgrade file.  Note for the upgrade through the FreeNAS UI,…

Xen – which dom0 platform makes sense?

When I first started running Xen at home, it was on Fedora Core 6, and I was using hardware which didn’t include hardware-level virtualization support.  Crazy huh? Since the first iterations of my home server, I’ve been through Centos 5, and my current home server runs Scientific Linux 6 (SL6) for which I had to…

ZFS on Xen – why so hard?

Ok, so no posts for a couple of weeks.  Why?  Well I’ve been banging my head against various ZFS appliances, trying to make them do what I want 🙂 What I want is to migrate my old HP Microserver over to new hardware, and in the process, change out a bunch of the network services…