On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 8:03 AM, Ed Heron <Ed@heron-ent.com> wrote:
On Thu, 2011-10-06 at 01:46 +0200, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
> ...
> The question is what does Xen offer that KVM cannot provide? Looking at the
> slides of the KVM Forum 2011 (http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/KVM_Forum_2011)
> there seem to be many interesting improvements in the pipeline so at some
> point the question really is why hold on to Xen at all when there is not
> real reason to?
> ...

 For me, it isn't "why hang onto Xen?", it's "why convert my 18
virtualization servers?"  Most of my servers are remote.  I have 8
physical locations.  Each location has a spare server for redundancy.
To change to anything else, I'd need a compelling reason as the time and
effort and, potentially, travel expenses would be significant.

 Looking at scheduled CentOS 5 EOL, I can get other things done before
having to tackle major upgrades.  When I do start working on my next
iteration of my system design, I'll be considering all hypervisors.


And in addition to that if it isn't broken.... CentOS 5.7 just came out so it's not like it's an old unsupported distribution and I bet that isn't the last update that Redhat will do. I just moved some of my VMs to XCP as a test which is using the exact same version of the Xen hypervisor that I was running before. In my opinion the Hypervisor isn't really that important anymore. What's more important is the management tools for them. With the Cloud.com acquisition by Citrix, OpenStack and more I think one would spend more time thinking of these tools than which hypervisor to use.

Another point would be that the Dom0 doesn't really matter that much. It's not like you'll ever change it outside of adding security patches. By desgin the Dom0 just sits there and manages DomU's. If anything the DomU OS is more important.

Grant McWilliams
http://grantmcwilliams.com/

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use Windows."
Now they have two problems.