Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of velo2max
velo2max

asked on

Which distro should I use for Xen

Hi gurus,

Am looking at a Linux distro...
To run one VM at a time on a linux box without GUI.

On which distro Xen is developped?
On which distro Xen is first tested?
On which distro Xen has the biggest community?

I have experience with Fedora and Debian but I can learn another one if it brings benefits.

Thanks!
Avatar of rindi
rindi
Flag of Switzerland image

Personally I don't use Xen, but OpenSUSE and it Yast system has it directly available, where you can choose the Hypervisor, between Xen and KVM.
I second OpenSUSE for Xen.  They fully support it and you can use yast to patch it easily.  It's also fully integrated so the setup for can be done during the initial install.

You also have zipper ps to identify running processes that need to be restarted after a patch so you can just restart just the process without a full reboot.  It allows you to delay the restart until you're ready to do so, but still see what needs to be restarted later.
Avatar of velo2max
velo2max

ASKER

Hi,

I guess OpenSuse is to Suse what CentOS is to RHEL... a free distro of an enterprise one ?

It does not have a lot of "famous children" like Debian or Ubuntu.

But then my question is XEN developped on OpenSuse?
No, OpenSUSE is to SUSE what Fedora is to Redhat, the free, community supported, testing edition from which SUSE is built from.

CentOS is a clone of Redhat built from their source code, so basically they are exactly the same.
Xen is largely backed by Citrix.
Any comments from Experts actually using Xen?
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of serialband
serialband
Flag of Ukraine image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Hi, what I want is to be in a huge community and avoid being marginal.

I also want to get the latest updates quickly. I know that some distros are late with some packages. I remember having trouble getting the most recent Qemu package in Debian (well it was possible but it needed to enter a complex (at least for me) recompile process). I want to avoid this...
SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Still dont know on which distro Xen is developped (looks like CentOS but not sure) but the recommendation makes sense
I will go with OpenSUSE and cross my fingers ;-)
I mentioned above it was largely backed by Citrix. I know they bought Xen a couple of years ago, and as far as I know the brand name still belongs to Citrix. But they have made it OpenSource so it is largely independent. You could compare it's status to VirtualBox which is also still OpenSource but belongs to Oracle.
As far as I know, Citrix is a company name. I don't find a distro with that name. The reason I wanted that info is because you cannot have a more up-to-date package than on the distro where it is developped! Thank you for your kind help!
Citrix is a company. Xen isn't tied to any distro, it is a separate product. Citrix also provides a hypervisor, and that is provided by Xen.