[CentOS-virt] redhat's Qumranet acquisition

Wed Sep 10 18:41:19 UTC 2008
Joshua Daniel Franklin <jdf.lists at gmail.com>

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 2:02 AM, admin wrote:
> We're looking for a virtualisation platform to deploy in our production
> environment (local government network).
>
> After considering VMWare, we're probably most interested in Xen.
> We would be using RHEL/CentOS hosts, so I'm wondering how much time and
> energy to put into Xen if it will be "deprecated" in 12-18 months. The boss
> has sensibly ruled out KVM/Ovirt for the time being. I guess RH will make
> sure Xen->KVM migration fairly seamless when the time comes.

Xen is not deprecated. The Xen support in EL5 is not going anywhere. The
main issue as I understand it is that maintaining Xen is requiring more effort
than expected because it has not been integrated into the linux kernel.
Meanwhile KVM is already in the upstream kernel. It's not known yet what
EL6 will have, but I think the indication from Fedora is that both Xen and KVM
will remain supported:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Fedora8VirtQuickStart

I could easily be wrong, though. KVM is certainly the wave of the future, but
it's definitely not supported in EL5 (though there is the unsupported CentOS
guide at http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/KVM )

Also keep in mind that Red Hat recommends the libvirt tools (virt-manager etc)
which abstract Xen or KVM commands. I'm guessing XenSource would want
you to use the Xen-specific tools (xm etc).

(By the way, you do realize that VMWare ESXi is free? It comes on servers from
several vendors, including Dell and HP.  It would be a pain to manage more than
about 5-10 servers without the management console which is not free, though.)