[PLUG] Xen Hypervisor

[MJang]

On Wed, 2010-05-05 at 21:40 -0700, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> On Wed, 5 May 2010, Daniel Herrington wrote:
> 
> > All,
> >
> > I've been thinking of switching from vmware server to full 
> > virtualization on my laptop using Xen. I would have the Xen 
> > hypervisor running and then Dom0 running a linux flavor with my 
> > virtual machines converted to Xen guests. Is anyone Xen? Do you 
> > think this would be feasible? What linux flavor would you recommend 
> > as Dom0?
> 
> Red Hat and related distributions (Fedora, CentOS) are switching to 
> KVM. I don't know if the switch says anything about Xen's long-term 
> non-Red Hat prospects -- but if you're commited to Xen, Red Hat is 
> definitely not the way to go.
> 
> Debian stable (lenny) has good Xen support, and it's likely to be 
> around for a while. I suspect the LTS versions of Ubuntu are in the 
> same boat.

FWIW, I think KVM is easier to implement, as it's just a few kernel
modules, as opposed to a completely separate kernel. Last time I tried
Xen, it didn't work with a lot of network cards. It was especially
incompatible with wireless cards. Anything that's tied to a certain
version of a kernel has to be done separately for Xen.

In the transition, Red Hat has made sure its tools (virt-install,
virt-manager, virsh) work just as well with KVM. And when I've tried it
with M$, I've felt no difference. If I remember right, Ubuntu has
adapted the same tools.

One of the issues with Xen is that its owner, Citrix, is especially cozy
with Microsoft. If I remember right, some of the enterprise-level Xen
admin tools now work only on MS systems (despite their continued use of
the Linux kernel source code for the actual VMs).

Thanks,
Mike