[CentOS] xen vs kvm for virtualization on centos/rhel?

Mon Aug 9 20:04:30 UTC 2010
Kwan Lowe <kwan.lowe at gmail.com>

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 2:06 PM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
>
>  as i'm reviewing the courseware for the rhel (centos) course
> i'm teaching next week, i'm going to ask the occasional question,
> possibly technical, possibly more policy.
>
>  first one involves the choice for virtualization.  the course has a
> short section involving virt using xen but everything i've read
> suggests that red hat is concentrating on kvm for virt.  thoughts on
> that?  i have the freedom to replace the xen section with one covering
> kvm instead.

I'm running both Xen and KVM.

If you're using the virt-* tools then RedHat does a pretty decent job
of hiding the underlying virtualization engine. My virt-install script
ran pretty much unchanged from Xen to KVM.  If you're teaching a
troubleshooting course, I think you need to cover both technologies as
I do see a lot of Xen machines out there.  Otherwise I'd concentrate
on KVM and maybe give a few minutes on the differences (how disks are
referenced, setting up bridging adapter, etc..).