On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 12:11:26PM -0500, Stephen Harris wrote:
I'm wondering what people recommend for virtual servers these days? CentOS 4 with a vserver kernel? Wait for CentOS 5 and use Xen? VMware? (Vmware is the heavy solution, but it does mean I could host a windows session if I wanted to). Or Solaris 10 and zones?
Personally I'm using VMWare-workstation, but it isn't an ideal solution: - it costs - it is hard to make VMs start at system boot - it is a heavyweight solution
The reason I am using -Workstatin as opposed to the free -Server offering is because -Server does not provide some virtual hardware that is useful in a workstation environment.
I find it odd what drives your requirements in the end. In my particular case, I am connecting to a Windows VM through a Sun Ray session, and found my Windows VMs were less usefull without the sound devices because Windows Movie Maker would not start on a system which lacked a sound card. (And I wanted Windows Movie Maker to convert video streams from the high-bitrate that comes from the camera down to something a little more portable, not to actually view anything.)
I am probably going to split things up, though -- I have an older system which I will move the Windows VMs to, and then run -Server on my main system so I can do the other virtualization things I want to (mostly experimenting with other OSs and sandboxing software packages I am playing with) much easier.
I have a 900-series Intel Core Duo processor, purchased expressly so that I could do Xen and the like but have found that they are not quite ready for the kind of use I want to put them to.