leveraging centos and xen for the go daddy private cloud

Mike Dorman

mdorman@godaddy.comSystems Engineer, Private Cloud Platform

CENTOS & XEN AT GO DADDY

PARADIGM CHALLENGES• Traditionally a very static environment• Management, monitoring, security tools

good at this• Mindset shift: care about services, not

servers• Cloud ideal vs. reality

STACK ATTACK

WHY NOT XEN SERVER?• XenServer is a good package of Xen

• Microsoft support

• Good approach if that’s what you need

• Support of XenServer is more difficult

• It looks like Linux, but can’t treat it like Linux

• Need something that is more flexible

WHY CENTOS + XEN?• Stock CentOS, not an appliance

• Much experience supporting it

• Leverage larger Linux user community

• Drops in to management/monitoring systems

• Patch management/upgrades

• Better fit for our cloud – no fighting with XenServer for control

GETTING TO ‘YUM INSTALL XEN’• Interest/demand from community

• Can run Xen on CentOS today, but non-trivial

• Mostly a packaging problem

• Teams from CentOS, Xen, Citrix, Rackspace, and Go Daddy

• QA and usability sanity checks

http://wiki.centos.org/QaWiki/Xen4x.co/centosxen