Tech

Intro At Infoxchange we use XenServer as our Virtualisation of choice. There are many reasons for this including: Open Source. Offers greater performance than VMware. Affordability (it’s free unless you purchase support). Proven backend Xen is very reliable. Reliable cross-host migrations of VMs. The XenCentre client, (although having to run in a Windows VM) is quick and simple to use. Upgrades and patches have proven to be more reliable than VMware. OpenStack while interesting, is not yet reliable or streamlined enough for our small team of 4 to implement and manage. XenServer Storage & Filesystems Unfortunately the downside to XenServer is that it’s underlying OS is quite old. The latest version (6.5) about to be released is still based on Centos 5 and still lacks any form of EXT4 and BTRFS support, direct disk access is not available… without some tweaking and has no real support for TRIM unless you have direct disk access and are happy with EXT3. ...

“Should I run a larger parameter model, or a higher quality smaller model of the same family?” TLDR; Larger parameter model [lower quantisation quality] > Smaller parameter model [higher quantisation quality] E.g: Qwen2.5 32B Q3_K_M > Qwen2.5 14B Q8_0 Caveats: Don’t go lower than Q3_K_M, or IQ2_M, especially if the model is under 30B~ parameters. This is in the context of two models of the same family and version (e.g. Qwen2.5 Coder). Longer answer: Check out the Code Chaos and Copilots slide deck. ...