[CentOS] Centos 5.2 and Xen

russ at vshift.com russ at vshift.com
Wed Jun 11 23:03:39 UTC 2008


If you only have 512mb of ram, there's almost no reason to virtualize. Windows needs a minimum of 128-512MB to run stable.  I highly suggest that you get more RAM - its very cheap these days.  

If you want to dedicate a box to virtualization, and won't be using more then 4GB of ram for your virtual machines - I highly recommend xenserver express.  Its free, but has much better performance then vmware.  

Looking at it more closely, it seems to be rhel5, or more likely centos5 under the hood, so you can probably use the host for other things too.

I wonder if it can be combined with other techologies - KVM, openVZ, etc to give more then 4GB of ram for virtualization?  I tried installing vmware, but it wouldn't run under.a xen kernel.  

RuSs
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

-----Original Message-----
From: "Lanny Marcus" <lmmailinglists at gmail.com>

Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:22:12 
To:"CentOS mailing list" <centos at centos.org>
Subject: Re: [CentOS] Centos 5.2 and Xen


On 6/11/08, Ned Slider <ned at unixmail.co.uk> wrote:
<snip>
> I've run VMware Server (free, as in cost, not as in open source) on
> CentOS to host WinXP VMs since it was in beta and have no complaints.
> There is an RPM package available on VMware's site:
>
> $ rpm -q VMware-server
> VMware-server-1.0.6-91891.i386
>
> It's only available in i386 package but installs fine on x86_64 and
> supports 64-bit VMs provided the underlying hardware supports it. I
> believe VMs are limited to a max of 2 processors each.
>
> I've used VMware Server on systems varying from old AthlonXP, 512MB RAM
> through to Intel Quad Core Q6600 with 4GB RAM. Note VMware will run on
> older processors without hardware virtualization. In my experience
> there's little noticeable difference between software and hardware
> virtualization (on VMware), and each run at about the perceived speed
> you would expect if it was on native hardware (I've not conducted any
> benchmark tests). The main consideration is that you have enough RAM to
> support the host OS (CentOS) and any VM(s) running on it.
>
> I've not used Xen so can't offer a comparison.

Ned: I was very interested to read that you've run VMWare Server on
systems with only 512 MB of RAM.   I haven't tried it, because the box
I can use only has 512 MB of RAM.

My impression is that Xen is much more demanding about HW.  Lanny
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