[CentOS] virtualization on the desktop a myth, or a reality?

Thu Mar 3 11:12:51 UTC 2011
Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org>

On Wed, 2011-03-02 at 19:29 +0200, Rudi Ahlers wrote: 
> I am busy setting up some XEN servers on a SAN for high availability
> and Cloud Computing, and thought it could be cool to setup
> virtualization on a CentOS 5.5 Desktop, running on a Core i3 + 4GB
> RAM, and use the SAN's storage to see if it could actually be worth my
> while to replicate a Cloud Computing setup in the office. And, cause I
> got a bit bored waiting for a few RAID-sets to finish initializing.
> So, I installed CentOS + KDE, chose the Virtualization package and
> used Virtual Machine Manager to setup another CentOS VM inside CentOS
> (I only have a CentOS ISO on this SAN, since we don't use Debian /
> Slackware / FC / Ubuntu / etc). The installation was probably about
> the same speed as it would be on raw hardware. But, using the
> interface is painfully slow. I opened up Firefox and browsed the web a
> bit. The mouse cursor lagged a bit and whenever I loaded a slow /
> large website, it seemed asif the whole VM lagged behind.

I have openSUSE 11.3 GNOME desktop instances in VMware ESX... works
great and performance is good.

> Wouldn't it be nice to run Windows, of for that matter Solaris /
> FreeBSD / MAC (graphics designer) / another flavor of Linux / etc
> inside your favorite Linux, and access it from the Desktop without too
> much trouble?

Do this every day from my openSUSE 11.3/GNOME laptop; accessing openSUSE
11.3/GNOME instance on ESX as well as a Windows Vista instance in local
VMware Workstation.  Works great, performance is good.

I only have CentOS instances as servers (all in VMware ESX... and, of
course, performance is very good).