New Server, Just Looking For Direction

[proggR]

I recently acquired an old Compaq Provaliant 3000 for $125 CAD. It has one 600Mhz P3 chip (with a socket for a second), 1.7Gb of RAM, 4 20GB SCSI HDs setup with RAID and 4 10GB SCSI HDs just because the guy didn't need them anymore that aren't installed at all at the moment. Its running Windows 2003 Server right now.

 

What I want to do is get used to running virtual servers on it (I've posted lots on here about this recently). I'll likely use Virtuozzo eventually but for now I'm going to use Xen. My dom0 will likely be NetBSD and I'm torrenting Debian to setup as a domU. I figured I'd go ahead and install NetBSD (after backing up the windows install in case I ever want it back) and then configure the kernel to be able to run as dom0 (or do I have to modify it before installing? Or download a separate ISO all together) and setup Xen. So I'm a little lost on that but I'm sure I can probably find documentation somewhere on it that would clear some questions and false information I may have. But on top of that, just now I remembered that somewhere in all this I'm going to have to account for the RAID and figure out a way to have backups of both domains. I'm having trouble visualizing how that would work. I'm new to every part of this so I'm looking forward to learning as much as I can.

 

Any references or help given would be much appreciated. Just enough to point me in a direction a little less confused.

Thanks in advance.

[steviewdr]

I used debian as dom0 and domu. It works very nice. No major work either. Debian has all the xen packages you need.

 

I wrote some details down about it at:

http://wiki.kartbuilding.net/index.php/Install_and_Config_Base_OS

http://wiki.kartbuilding.net/index.php/Debian_Etch_Xen_Install

 

-steve