Xen Enterprise , second experiences :)
pdx6 already mentionned last week but the Xen Enterprise Beta program has started, actually this is already the second beta round , the first one was only open to a really limited number of people.
so second experiences coz back when the first beta came out in early april I already had my first experiences... :)
Anyway ... with Novell and RedHat claiming Xen support in their future products, with opensource projects starting to try managing virtual machines, XenSource is up against some heavy competition, But from what I`ve seen so far, they are ahead of the competition. Xen-Enterprise is rather easy to install , as it isn't a package you need to install on an already installed Xen platform with a zillion non trivial dependencies but a complete distribution itselve, so you just pop in the CD and install it. Apart from the dedicated server (actually it's not so dedicated as I installed it on a sepearte partition of a box already running Xen) it also has a management client that you use from a remote platform which does not need to run Xen, so this can be your laptop or any other workstation. (The CD comes with both RPM's and some weird .exe thingie) from that management client you can manage multiple Xen Enterprise servers.
Apart from multiple servers you can also run multiple Distributions, within the previous beta's there was only support for Debian and RHEL but now Xensource added support for Suse (which I still have to test), installing both Debian and RedHat goes smooth from their gui (smother than the other alternatives I've seen) and stopping, suspending and restarting machines is also a feature where the competition is less succesful.
It's still a Beta and obviously there are things that can use some improvement, but Xensource is listening to it's beta testers, just the gui alone has improved a lot from it's previous beta's. So I`m sure they are heading the right direction.