Xen

After testing/playing with the fairly nicely finished virt-manager that is packaged with Fedora Core 6 (and hopefully in RHEL 5 when it eventually arrives) I was fairly sure that it would be 'good enough' to use as the management layer for our foray into virtualisation. Unfortunately it proved too difficult to effectively boot/install/manage windows VMs in its current state.

In order to get things running I have tested Xen Enterprise (3.1), that provided a nice pre-built dom0, very lightweight, with nothing that really needs playing with. There is a nice-ish gui (available on different platforms) that makes the installation of windows virtual machines a breese.

Unfortunately :

• No 64bit support yet
• No built-in way of doing clean installs of other linux OS's (such as CentOS)

Both of these are being addressed in a future version (I am told)

Lack of 64bit won't kill us right now, although it's rather a waste of the Opteron cores that we have.

In order to get CentOS working, I ended-up doing a minimal install of CentOS on a spare machine and then using the P2V process (that is really really slick) to migrate it to a VM. This VM can then be cloned as many times as we need.

Right now it all seems to work and the sub £500 pricetag seems quite reasonable.