[CentOS] Xen or VMWARE on CentOS 5

[Ross S. W. Walker]

Rudi Ahlers wrote:
> David Mackintosh wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 08:03:09AM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> >   
> >> Ern jura wrote:
> >>     
> >>> Does anyone out there have a comprehensive tutorial on installing VMware 
> >>> and
> >>> successfully managing virtual machines with either xen or vmware?
> >>>       
> >> VMware is pretty simple: download the server rpm, install it, run the 
> >> vmware-config.pl setup script to set the options and install your (free) 
> >> license key.  Then run vmware locally or from some other machine to 
> >> access the console where you can create and start the virtual machines. 
> >>  Once created, you can treat the virtual machines like they were 
> >> separate physical boxes except that they contend for host resources (and 
> >> once they are up on the network I prefer to connect directly to them 
> >> with ssh, X, freenx, or vnc instead of using the VMware console.  You'll 
> >> want plenty of RAM on the host machine and if you run several VM's they 
> >> will perform better if you can spread them over different disk drives.
> >>
> >> With VMware you can copy your disk images over to a Windows or Mac host 
> >> and run them with no changes (Mac version isn't free, though).
> >>     
> >
> > This is pretty much what I do.  I also keep stock "reference" images
> > for each OS I support and copy from the reference image every time I
> > need to deploy a new VM.
> >
> > I like the idea of Xen, but the documentation is a little thin
> > especially when it comes to installing useful things like Windows
> > VMs; I don't have the time to solve the problem properly, and I hope
> > that in a year or two I can change this.
>
> So, what would you use if you wanted to / needed to host a 
> Windows 2003 
> VM on a Linux / UNIX server? I don't / can't sacrifice a whole server 
> for a few ASP.NET aps.

For me I like the features that Xen provides like hot-add
memory/processor/storage, live migration, etc. Though if you are not
using the commercial version you are kind of limited to the command
line for management, if that bother's you then maybe VMware more
suites your taste.

Oh, both products can host multiple Windows and Linux VMs side-by-side
no problem.

-Ross


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