On Wed, 2011-03-02 at 19:29 +0200, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
I am busy setting up some XEN servers on a SAN for high availability and Cloud Computing, and thought it could be cool to setup virtualization on a CentOS 5.5 Desktop, running on a Core i3 + 4GB RAM, and use the SAN's storage to see if it could actually be worth my while to replicate a Cloud Computing setup in the office. And, cause I got a bit bored waiting for a few RAID-sets to finish initializing. So, I installed CentOS + KDE, chose the Virtualization package and used Virtual Machine Manager to setup another CentOS VM inside CentOS (I only have a CentOS ISO on this SAN, since we don't use Debian / Slackware / FC / Ubuntu / etc). The installation was probably about the same speed as it would be on raw hardware. But, using the interface is painfully slow. I opened up Firefox and browsed the web a bit. The mouse cursor lagged a bit and whenever I loaded a slow / large website, it seemed asif the whole VM lagged behind.
I have openSUSE 11.3 GNOME desktop instances in VMware ESX... works great and performance is good.
Wouldn't it be nice to run Windows, of for that matter Solaris / FreeBSD / MAC (graphics designer) / another flavor of Linux / etc inside your favorite Linux, and access it from the Desktop without too much trouble?
Do this every day from my openSUSE 11.3/GNOME laptop; accessing openSUSE 11.3/GNOME instance on ESX as well as a Windows Vista instance in local VMware Workstation. Works great, performance is good.
I only have CentOS instances as servers (all in VMware ESX... and, of course, performance is very good).