CH Hosting Blog

Solusvm just released new version of VPS control panel 1.2.1o which support the custom kernel under xen pv.

” PyGrub support for Xen PV.
PyGrub enables you to start Linux DomUs with the kernels that lie in the filesystem of the DomU instead of with a Kernel that lies in the filesystem of the Dom0. This enables easier kernel update from DomU.” - http://blog.soluslabs.com/

So, how to setup your pygrub in centos and debian VPS? Please follow this instruction originated from Solusvm Wiki:
Inside the Debian VPS run this:

aptitude install linux-image-2.6-xen-amd64 grub
mkdir /boot/grub
echo “(hd0) /dev/sda” > /boot/grub/device.map
mknod /dev/sda b 202 0
update-grub

That’s it…

You can have your own kernel now.

Inside the CentOS VPS run:

yum install kernel-xen grub
ln -s /boot/grub/grub.conf /boot/grub/menu.lst

Once thats done you need to check the menu.lst and make sure it matches the kernel files inside /boot:
#ls -l /boot
total 7276
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 1209395 Jul 1 20:08 System.map-2.6.18-194.8.1.el5xen
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 66552 Jul 1 20:08 config-2.6.18-194.8.1.el5xen
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jul 14 10:39 grub
-rw——- 1 root root 2495715 Jul 14 10:38 initrd-2.6.18-194.8.1.el5xen.img
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 80032 Mar 16 2009 message
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 112259 Jul 1 20:09 symvers-2.6.18-194.8.1.el5xen.gz
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 2047941 Jul 1 20:08 vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.8.1.el5xen
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 969816 Jul 1 20:56 xen-syms-2.6.18-194.8.1.el5
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 417433 Jul 1 18:58 xen.gz-2.6.18-194.8.1.el5

#cat /boot/grub/menu.lst
default=0
timeout=10
title vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.8.1.el5xen
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.8.1.el5xen console=xvc0 root=/dev/sda1 ro
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-194.8.1.el5xen.img

Ready to go…..

We had recently ordered new server in Falkenstein, Germany. This is mainly the expansion plan to cover the customers from Europe countries. This will give better latency and reduce the route to EU countries.

With this expansion, we ordered server with Hetzner AG, one of the large dedicated hosting provider in Germany with full automation to the end user including of OS reload, emergency rescue….etc. Below is our server spec:

Server Spec
Intel® Core™ i7-920 Quadcore @ 2.66GHz with Hyper-Threading Technology
12 GB DDR3 RAM
1500 GB SATA-II HDD with RAID 1
1 GBit OnBoard NIC connected at 100 MBit (unfortunately Hetzner didn’t provide with 1GE, yet)

You can get the details of the server here http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/eq6/

With this expansion, we are now able to serve the EU customer who which to have closer VPS node to their base and we believe with this hardware node, we able to serve the needs of each customers!