[TriLUG] Xen questions

[Owen Berry]

Some questions for those Xen and virtualization gurus out there. First,
some background. I run Fedora Core 4 on my workstation, but a lot of
what I develop ends up running on RHEL3/4 servers. Every now and then I
have problems because of differences in Perl modules or packaging on the
"production" machines. I suspect these problems will get worse over time
as I'm "forced" to move to more recent versions of Fedora.

I'm wondering if I could improve my lot by using Xen to setup CentOS
virtual hosts on my development machine, to more closely replicate the
production machines. Xen appeals to me over other VM techniques
because of it's low overhead - I have a decent workstation but it's
still single CPU and 512M ram.

1) Is this something that Xen would be good for?
2) Am I right in thinking that Xen would be a good virtualization
   choice? I have a VMWare license, but I'm thinking it'll take too much
   in the way of resources.
3) Sometimes people need to access my web server. Will I be able to
   forward connections to a virtual machine, possibly using mod_proxy on
   Apache. Or is there a more seemless way to do this? Not sure how
   networking works in Xen, and assuming something similar to VMWare.
4) I'm thinking it would be beneficial to upgrade from FC4 to FC5 before
   trying out Xen. Sound right?

BTW, I don't really want to convert my workstation to running CentOS so
please don't suggest it, unless you feel you have to. :-)

TIA,
Owen