[CentOS-virt] New to the list ... Looking for anyrecommendations inre: VMWare Vs. Xen

Holtz,Robert Robert.Holtz at edwardjones.com
Fri Nov 9 20:40:05 UTC 2007


Scott,

Thanks for your input.  The article was a good read.

Reference: Athlon 64 x2 system with 8GB of memory.

I've got a few issues that have me vacillating:
- Ease of use, i.e., I'm being lazy and customizations can be time consuming. :)
- Xen being built into the CentOS build is a large positive factor.
- Xen's Express version limitations: 4GB RAM and 4 VM. Bad thing.
- Windows 2003 Server is one Guest OS.  There will be several of these, i.e., an M$ infrastructure.
- *nix variants: Solaris and Fedora.
- The version of VMWare is the freebie.  The unmodified OS support is a big plus.

I guess I could run two Linux on Linux VM's and have two Xen hosts running to get around their limitations?

This does seem a bit obsessive though! ;)



----- "Robert Holtz" <Robert.Holtz at edwardjones.com> wrote:
> The two main ones that I know of are Xen and VMWare.  VMWare seems to 
> be the most capable inre: number and size of vm's allowed.  When 
> looking at Xen it appears that since Citrix acquired them the free 
> version is cripple-ware and is very restrictive.

Xen virtualization is included as part of CentOS 5.  Xensource's XenServer Exoress Edition, so far as I can tell, hasn't changed at all since Citrix took them over - dual-socket with upto 4GB of RAM, and four virtual machines.  What does XenSource's product have to do with CentOS.

Regarding VMware, are you talking about the free VMware Server or the very expensive VMware ESX/Infrastructure?  If the former, there is a lot more overhead with VMware Server when compared to Xen but VMware Server will allow you to run unmodified OSes... whereas Xen requires VT hardware support in the CPU to create fully-virtualized aka unmodified OSes.

If you are wanting to run Linux on Linux, I'd recommend you look into OpenVZ and/or Linux-VServer.

Oh, and while I'm here, I'll plug my recent interview with the Linux-VServer project leader:

Interview with Linux-VServer Project Leader Herbert Pötzl http://www.montanalinux.org/linux-vserver-interview.html

TYL,
--
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]
 
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