[CentOS] xen vs kvm for virtualization on centos/rhel?

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Mon Aug 9 18:34:38 UTC 2010


On Mon, 9 Aug 2010, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

>  as i'm reviewing the courseware for the rhel (centos) course i'm 
> teaching next week, i'm going to ask the occasional question, 
> possibly technical, possibly more policy.
>
>  first one involves the choice for virtualization.  the course has a 
> short section involving virt using xen but everything i've read 
> suggests that red hat is concentrating on kvm for virt.  thoughts on 
> that?  i have the freedom to replace the xen section with one 
> covering kvm instead.

KVM feels less intrusive to me, but Xen configuration seemed to have a 
shorter learning curve.

I don't really need a lot of performance in my VMs, so I can't comment 
on speed; both do the trick.

Red Hat has done a nice job with virsh and virt-install, which both 
work as advertised whether you're running Xen or KVM.

My suggestion, fwiw, is to figure out if students are more interested 
in maintaining an installed base of VMs or in installing a new VM 
infrastructure. Chances are, maintenance is more Xen-heavy, while KVM 
is more the way forward for new installations.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/



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