Linux & Virtualization on Altix

[Ed Wilts]

On Sun, Jul 24, 2005 at 09:01:49AM -0400, Jason Dixon wrote:
> We recently picked up a new SGI Altix 350 (2 bricks, 4 cpus, 4GB) for  
> "playing around", although it will hopefully become a part of our  
> corporate development environment.  It came installed with SuSE 9  
> SLES (which I'm not very fond of) and some Red Hat Enterprise for  
> Itanium CDs, which I'd like to install in it.  I'd like to do some  
> sort of virtualization, a la Xen, to allocate virtual systems to  
> various developers, but I'm not finding much that will run on the  
> Altix 350 in 32-bit mode with SMP, much less ia64.
> 
> Has anyone run Xen on *any* flavor of Linux running on Altix (in  
> particular, Red Hat/Fedora-based)?  Any suggestions or ideas?

I went to a couple of Xen presentations at the Red Hat Summit in early
June.  The comment there was that x86 32bit was mostly working now but
that x86_64, ia64, amc ppc64 were "still in flux".

Rik van Riel also said that Xen 3.0 was "not stable yet but in Fedora
Core 4".  He expected 1-2 months for a feature freeze and 3-4 months
before it got stable.

Intel has 30 developers working on Xen according to the Intel keynote.

I don't know if VMware supports the ia64 yet - from a quick look at
their web site, they didn't in VMware 4 but they're not really saying if
it's supported in VMware 5.

There is a mailing list for Xen discussions - you could try there.
http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/virtualization/

-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program