[clue-tech] Virtualization, GuestOS bare metal restore/reload

[mike havlicek]

Hello,

I have been poking around with the idea of virtualization. I have an IBM
eServer xseries 360 that I have been playing with VMware ESX 3i demo. The immediate problem that I see is how to bare metal restore a geust. I suspect that add on products handle everything one could wish to do.

The scenario I am anticipating is having to rebuild the hypervisor itself
say on a new set of disks and then reloading the guests. I figure with the
VMware products there is a clean way to do this sort of thing at full purchase prices.

What I am wondering is what other alternative products folks have experience with handling this sort of rebuild and any suggestions for hosting a "hypervisor" on this IBM server. I am toying with the idea of using NFS mounted disk space from a Solaris 9 server to store VMs. I have not yet looked into how this would work with Xen. I do suspect that any
hypervisor running under redhat or a derivative would require a non redhat
kernel on this hardware. In theory the NFS mounted space works OK with ESX 3i, although taking the mounts offline from the NFS server threw a monkey
wrench in things. (I did stop the VMs that were stored on the NFS mounts, prior to unsharing but I didn't put the hypervisor in maintenance mode (and don't know if that would have circumvented those VMs becoming unknown). But I get ahead of myself ... and further ahead what about SAN ... (I don't know when I will have my home SAN running :)

Thanks,

Mike