I'm wondering what others who have already used the Xen kernel for DomUs and the (free) VMWare Server can say about the comparison in actual day-to-day operation. I've only started playing with Xen on CentOS 5 and I've been running VMWare Server only on Win2k3 servers so far, so I'm missing direct comparibility. I find that VMWare is highly reliable and flexible, but needs a good portion of RAM and CPU for working nicely. Xen seems to be less reliable, but more responsive on low ressources. It's also more flexible when you want to move it around as it is all stored in a single file and the config file takes only a few options. Xen is supposed to give "almost the same performance" as if not virtualized. I get confusing figures from the Virtual Machine Manager. On my test machine the Dom0 takes about 9% of the CPU with one VM when both are mostly idle. Top says that 3% of that is taken by the X-Server, most of the rest is shared by two python processes (which belong to Xen I suppose) and xenstored. (The test machine is on a single Athlon 2500+ or around that, not sure about the exact speed.) But regularly one of the python processes grabs another 10-15%, so the whole CPU utilization goes up to around 20%. Although the single VM is idle at that time and shows 0.0x%. So, even when idle the whole CPU utilization zigzags between 10 and 20%. I found that when I close the VM console that drops to 2-3%, so that python process is obviously related to the VM console. The interesting thing is that when I then reopen the console from the VM manager it keeps going at about 3% and doesn't go up to the earlier 9%. But it still zigzags between 3 and 11% then. All the figures have been taken from the VM manager. The %us count in top seems to stay at 3% all the time. With less reliable I refer to a filesystem problem that seems to occur sometimes after rebooting/shutdown. Sometimes after rebooting there either is no filesystem file anymore (which is not healable, of course) or the kernel panics with a filesystem problem on first boot or reboot, but may boot just fine after a second or third try. The problem that the filesystem file is just gone seems to happen only when I reboot/shutdown from within the console with the shutdown/reboot command. For instance it can happen if I let it do the first reboot after I installed the OS on the VM. When I "xm shutdown" or CRTL+ALT+DEL or hit the shutdown button on the Virtual Machine Manager it does not *seem* to happen (maybe I just didn't shutdown often enough to see it happen there as well.) I've already lost several testing VMs because of this. I wonder if this problem might happen because I use the option of not allocating all space in the filesystem file right-away. I also wonder if performance might be better if it wouldn't need to grow. So, are there recommended best practices for Xen VMs like "always use partitions", "always allocated whole space at once", "never shutdown from the console window", "never use virtual machine manager" or some such? Kai -- Kai Schätzl, Berlin, Germany