[CentOS-virt] Xen version

Thu Dec 16 19:53:48 UTC 2010
Luke S Crawford <lsc at prgmr.com>

nux at li.nux.ro writes:
> 
> Why get complicated and not use KVM? Xen's future @ RedHat is not that 
> bright.


while I agree that Xen's future at redhat does not sound bright
(I was working as a virutalization guy at a large company with 
a large RHEL installed base.  as soon as RedHat bought Qumranet,
all our Xen support people (and several higher-ups) came out
to give fancy "xen sucks" presentations, even though KVM
was clearly not ready for prime time at the moment.)   

The question, though, is "when will KVM be ready?"  for some
things, it's ready and pretty good right now.  If you have a 
computer that only needs to spin up a guest every now and again,
kvm is alrealdy much better.  managing a Xen dom0 is a pain in the
ass and while it's worth it for my case where the servers do nothing
but host virtual servers, it would suck for a desktop or for
a server that primarily did other things.   If you need
a lot of guests, though?  Xen is still the best choice, as far as 
I can tell. 

I bought a friend's company that does what I do with KVM,
so I am supporting KVM now, and will eventually open new orders 
for KVM guest, but it will be a long time (if ever) before I 
even think about moving everything over to KVM.

I don't know if the problem is kvm or drbd, but one guest
swapstorming out of 8 brings the whole server to it's knees. 
When CentOS6 is out I'll be moving off of drbd on to local storage
on a centos host, so we will see if the problem is, in fact
drbd.