[CentOS-virt] Hey

Wed Jan 29 01:53:01 UTC 2014
Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com>

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 1:22 PM, Robert Dinse <nanook at eskimo.com> wrote:
>
>       I've used both Xen and KVM and at least in benchmarks of applications I
> did here I didn't see much difference and since KVM is natively supported by
> RedHat, that's what I've been using.

I used to use Xen. As far as I can tell, I published the first SRPM's
for it, back when it was open entirely open source, before Citrix
bought it.  As far as I  can tell, the open source Xen suffers from
many of the same problems as KVM and qemu. Namely, the gui and command
line tool, "libvirt", is poorly built overburdened debris that does
not fulfill *anyone's* standards of a good configuration tool,
especially the open source GUI guidelines written by Eric Raymond in
his "Luxury of Ignorance" essay.

That said, Xen suffers no more from it than KVM does. It also doesn't
have the stunningly painful requirements to override NetworkManager
and manually configure the bridge device, as documented by me years
ago at at https://wikis.uit.tufts.edu/confluence/display/TUSKpub/Configure+Pair+Bonding+and+Bridges+for+KVM+Hypervisor.


>       Obviously on this list there is mostly Xen users, and I feel like I must
> be missing some great advantage so I am curious, those of you who prefer Xen,
> why?

Personally, I use Virtualbox or corporate supplied VMware these days.
Not becuase I don't like open source tools, but because I prefer to
spend my subtle confifation time more usefully than working through
libvirt and NetworkManager manual, poorly documented, unintegrated
confuiguration steps just to get things to work normally.