Replaced my old colo machine with a newer IBM X335 SCSI RAID1 based system this afternoon. Usually story, things never go according to plan.
I’ve replaced my User-Mode-Linux based system with XEN. Seems to work well. There are a few performance issues. I think though this is mainly network related. All the disk direct benchmarks I’ve done so far seem to indicate similar performance for the host and guest domains. Of course, since the Host is itself a guest of of the hypervisor it doesn’t running completely at native speeds. Unfortunately I didn’t spend the time doing some disk benchmarks for non-XEN kernels. However the “buffered disk reads” figures I posted previously should be the almost twice as much for a SCSI U160 system.
No matter, at least its better than the glum and glue I was using previous. I’m use the XEN guys will get around to improving this performance in due course. Anyway the performance in the guests is better than a UML based system, and I never really had much luck with the Linux vserver project.
If my back wasn’t giving my some issues at the moment, I’d probably make a short list of issues I had while upgrading and reinstalling the guest OSs. Then getting the applications (include wordpress) back up an running. For instances, took me a while to realise that mysql.so was commented out in php.ini by default. I was fiddling around with mysql GRANT tables, and all manor of other stuff. WordPress needs a better error message for this situation, more like the phpmyadmin. While on the subject of MYSQL Grant tables, this page is a the main reference on the various different levels (column, table, database, global) of privileges.
Anyway a list of these later.