On 3/2/2011 2:06 PM, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
Differently put, we already do this with servers. One big& fast Quad XEON can run many client's Virtual Machines, very easily. And many of those Virtual Machines host a few hundred websites, thus saving a lot on rack space, electricity, etc, etc.
Servers are normally optimized with lots of disk spindles to spread multi-user use of the one remaining slow resource around.
True, but in a one-user-one-drive (or 2 drives in RAID1) setup, the disk I/O wouldn't be a problem, or the limiting factor.
I thought some of your scenarios involved doing things in both os's at once. Which will make them want the disk head to be in different places at the same time.
Give the VM its own disk and it won't have much impact on the host. You'll probably still want to run video-intense things natively, though. And if you aren't a developer doing throwaway tests, what's the point of using a VM for resource-intensive things anyway?
There are many reasons why one would do this kind of things. Just thinking of my normal day-to-day work, I often start-up a new VM to test certain functionality of some software package, without affecting anything on my PC.
If it is at work, why not park the VM on a server that is probably better equipped?
My laptop runs Windows 7 at this stage, purely for Quickbooks and a few other Windows-only applications. So, in this case it would be nice to have Windows running permanently on my PC which will allow the accounts person to still access it remotely on her PC and I can still do stuff in Quickbooks as needed. But, I would prefer real-time access.
Then why not run it as the host? It probably handles sleep mode and waking up on different networks better than Centos anyway. Or as a VM, park it on a server where everyone who needs access can reach it remotely.
I think the major problem here is that the tools at hand, i.e. XEN + Virtual Machine Manager (or for that matter VirtualBox / VMWare / etc) isn't yet optimized for this kind of usage.
I guess we need better VGA-passthrough drivers, and / or a more optimized interface. Accessing the VM's via VNC / Remote Desktop / XN / etc is also probably also a possibility.
Have you tried vmware player with vmware tools installed in the guest for comparison? Or NX connecting to freenx in the case of a Linux guest?
Yes, I know KVM is included, but at this stage XEN is the default and when you use the Virtual Machine Manager, it uses XEN.
Select Server Gui only, when it's up, use yum to install everything else. I think yum is a better way to install than the OS installer.
No, I'm not using VNC. My approach was from a single, non-networked PC-point-of-view. Someone who's never played with Virtual PC's and then opens up Virtual Machine Manager thinking it would be cool to use, wouldn't think of using VNC or something similar.
The virt-manager is good for monitoring the boot process, and provides the console you would need to do initial configuring of an OS. But it's not the best way to interact with the desktop of a VM.
I thought, just for the fun of it, let's install Windows 2008 Small Business Server. Interestingly, using the same Virtual Machine Manager, the installation wasn't as slow as with CentOS. It's almost asif it's more optimized for Windows? I used the exact same settings for the installation as with CentOS
Windows Server does well in a VM, but use Remote Desktop to connect - it's very usable for tasks that you would normally do on a server. Just not good for videos, or graphic intensive programs.
Can, or will virtualization replace dual boot systems or even give one the ability to use your Desktop PC to it's full advantage?
Dual boot can be problematic judging by the number of support requests on the net. Virtualization certainly has advantages.
It's the interfacing with the VM's desktop that's the bottleneck. Spice is what Redhat seems to like at the moment.
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Les Mikesell