What would you think is the best combination setup for Xen ?

[blues]

Hi,

I've read a lot of howtos here and greatly appreciate everyone's effort. Thank you.

One thing keeps bugging me. I plan to buy a poweredge 1950 64bit xeon dual-core to host my main website. This is clearly an overkill choice so to cover my expenses I plan to lease a few virtual dedicated server.

Still I wonder what would be the ideal combination to setup this server. I've read a lot of perfect setup and still cannot decide what would be the best setup.

For starter, Ive been running red hat and fedora for a long time and I'm use to it. So I was planning naturally to install Fedora Core 5 as my dom0 and FC5 as my own domU. I would probably run another domU to provide shared hosting and lease whatever resources I have left and let the admin choose there favorite linux distro.

What would you gurus do ? Surely, you must run similar setups, could you share what you consider being your best choice ?

Thanks in advance

[falko]

I'd use Debian and then follow one of the tutorials from here: http://www.howtoforge.com/taxonomy_menu/1/43 :)

[blues]

Thanks Falko,

I will follow your advice and jump into a Debian setup following your howtos.

Could you explain to me the advantages of using virtual networking instead of bridges.

Lets assume I'm able to give each my virtual machine a real internet ip address. What would be the advantages to use virtual networking ?

I guess I would have to configure mulitple nics in the vm's so they are able to use the internal 10.0.0.x and the actual internet ip address ?

[falko]

Could you explain to me the advantages of using virtual networking instead of bridges.Having a virtual network is exactly the same as having a router (that would be dom0) and behind that router you have several servers (domUs). Those servers can be protected by the router's firewall, and you need only one public IP address, but the disadvantage is that you can forward one port (e.g. 80) to only one server behind the router, not to multiple ones which means you could have only one web server (the other servers could then act as mail server, DNS server, etc.).

Lets assume I'm able to give each my virtual machine a real internet ip address. What would be the advantages to use virtual networking ? Then you don't need a virtual network. :)