[CentOS] Emulate RHEV On CentOS - A note on Xen v. KVM

Wed Sep 7 14:00:31 UTC 2011
Rudi Ahlers <Rudi at SoftDux.com>

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 3:51 PM, Digimer <linux at alteeve.com> wrote:
> On 09/07/2011 09:34 AM, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
>> Red Hat (and thus CentOS) has native XEN support but dropped XEN in
>> favor of KVM (which is not as mature yet) in RH 6.
>
> This deserves clarification...
>
> Red Hat is a business, and made a simple business decision. Maintaining
> Xen support would have meant maintaining a very large set of patches.
> They made the decision that the effort (and money) needed to maintain
> Xen outside of the mainline kernel was not worth it.
>

Well, I merely stated the facts of what the Red Hat Virtualization
package offers in the 2 different Red Hat releases, 5 & 6.


> KVM was not chosen over Xen so much as KVM was a much less expensive
> hypervisor to support. As for it being mature or not; Well, put on your
> kevlar pants because that is a matter of opinion.

I'm sure many people will argue against this perception since XEN has
been around much longer than KVM and, up to recently,"just worked"
every time. So the amount of effot they (or any other Linux distro)
had to put in to support it is minimal.
At the same time, in a different camp, there are those who speculate
that XEN was dropped since it's the defacto standard for Novell Suse /
OpenSuse and it's direct competition for Red Hat.

>
> As a follow-up, Xen dom0 support began getting into the mainline kernel
> at 2.6.33 (EL6 is based on 2.6.32). It is very likely that we will see
> Xen dom0 support returned in the next major release.

That would be nice and I'm sure Red Hat would gain some ground again
but if you look on the trend on the web many people stopped using Red
Hat (and derivatives of it, like CentOS) because of this very reason.


>
> --
> Digimer
> E-Mail:              digimer at alteeve.com
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-- 
Kind Regards
Rudi Ahlers
SoftDux

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