Xen and Ubuntu?

Solution 1:

Answers:

Ubuntu can be used as a dom0 host. I have used rhel5 as xen dom0 host on top of it i installed windows server 2k8 r2 and it works fine. I know rhel license is violated, but anyway i dont use rhel 5 support contract. i help myself and from the community. The steps i took to install xen on rhel with win serv 2k8 is documented in my blog in this url http://maximus2882.blogspot.com/2010/10/windows-2008-enterprise-on-rhel-55.html . Maybe that is of some use to you. It must be similar if not easier.
Xenserver does not install mdadm, it comes from the os package, in this ubuntu. You must do a #sudo apt-get install mdadm and use mdadm command to create RAID partition.
Multiple guest can share a same datastore but cannot share the same files. But can live in the same partition. the partitions and data in guest os is stored as files in host os. So they can happily share the same partition. I think there are ways to make a certain dir share between host os and guest os. I have done that in virtualbox in windows seven as host and fedora 14 as guest. Not sure how to do the same in xen , as i have limited with xen. I would suggest you go with vmware if you can. As my experience with vmware shows it is much matured and is the industry leader and has a smooth and consistent operation and interface that doesn't fail much.

If you use software raid on Linux, you should create a partition for your dom0 instance and a big partition with the rest of the hard drive.

Then, you use this big partition as a lvm physical drive and you create one or more lvm logical drive per vm.

This enable you to increase/decrease easily the size of a particular logicial drive.