Hervé Marcy's blog » Xen

Enable Intel VT on a HP laptop

admin — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:13:20 +0000

Intel VT technology is especially useful if you want to use virtualization technology such as Xen or KVM.
I personnally had the following problem after trying to insert the kvm-intel module on my Ubuntu 8.04 :

sudo modprobe kvm-intel
FATAL: Error inserting kvm_intel (/lib/modules/2.6.20-6-generic/kernel/drivers/kvm/kvm-intel.ko): Operation not permitted

In order to fully use your Intel processor on a HP laptop, follow the following steps :

- boot your computer
- when the BIOS window shows up, enter the BIOS manager
- enable the Virtualization technology in the BIOS menu
- save the changes and exit
- shut down your computer
- remove the battery and put it back in your PC
- boot your computer

and Intel VT should work without problem.

Citrix certified administrator XenServer Enterprise Edition 4

admin — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:47:29 +0000

After I wrote my degree dissertation about Xen, I took a Citrix Xenserver 4.1 training and I successfully passed the Xenserver certification.

Even if I disagree on the evolution of the project (Red Hat resigned from it, Linux distributions are optionally supported if you install the Linux pack from another DVD and, as we expected from Citrix, virtual servers running Windows are the priority of this platform), I already have a good knowledge of this technology and since it will be soon part of HP’s Insight dynamics, a management software managing virtual machines, I thought it was a good opportunity to go on with Xen. Moreover, it is still an open-source project and that is the reason why a VMware training would not have interested me that much.

Finally, I hope that HP will continue to support other virualization projects such as KVM, which is already part of the Linux kernel, and is really being pushed forward by IBM and Red Hat, for example.

Disaster recovery with Xen

admin — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:45:21 +0000

Xen has been the subject and of my degree dissertation (German : Diplomarbeit) I have been writing between June and September 2007.

I have been doing an internship at Hewlett Packard Germany between April and September in the Technology Solution Group division (the business division of HP for servers, storage and so on…), in the Outsourcing part of TSG.
This degree dissertation is a report of a disaster-recovery program implemented for the German bank MLP located in Wiesloch. This program has been designed by both MLP an HP people and implemented by HP colleagues and myself.

Basically, the concept is to shift a complete productive environment from one data center to another. This is achieved by a virtualized environment based on two servers SuSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP1 with Xen, two EVA 8000 (SAN solution of HP) and a HP product named “Continuous access” that mirrors constantly the content of one SAN to another.

If you want to learn more about my work, here is a link to my degree dissertation (only in German available). It is, of course, licensed under a Creative commons license.