I just want to save everyone a boatload of trouble...


If your considering using xen for this, don't.. Use vmware. I just went through a 6 month hard core test of xen in production environment. The project was fraught with problems. I would call it an absolute nightmare.

our xen setup

1) cisco fiberchannel switch (mds 9140)
2) 16 gb ram dell 1950's (emulux fiber channel cards)
3) cx700 EMC san with 25TB storage
4) cisco 4506 switches with

the problems

1) xen is not yet part of the linux main kernel. This means installing xen tools is a pain for this elastix distro kernel as you have already seen.

2) xen never really worked correctly. We would get random server locks...

3) installing the xen tools was not easy, i was never confident that the image i built was 100% proper.. Alot of hacking had to go into getting xen tools to install...

After 6 months of running production customers on this, we dumped xen and went back to VMware.

Vmware is much more suited for this application even though its more expensive. In a larger scale production environment, xen is just not ready yet. With the introduction of xen into the 3.0 mainline kernel maybe in a year or so it would be ready. For now I would avoid it for exastix.

Have you tried XenServer from Citrix? Is free and is totally pre-configured to do everything you need.

You can check differences between free and paid versions here www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/subf...sp?contentID=2300456

We've used Elastix on a Xen environment (free version / CentOS) for well over a year, and it works fine. Granted, we use it in HVM mode, not paravirtualized.

But it's possible that you have a bad Xen implementation...