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Red Hat Pledges 'Integrated Virtualization'
OSS_ilation writes "Red Hat was all about virtualization in a recent announcement for an 'integrated virtualization' initiative with XenSource and chipmakers AMD and Intel. The move was seen as a way for Red Hat to bring its commitment to virtualization technology into 'sharper focus [...] with the release of a product roadmap that includes virtualization technology built into its enterprise version of Linux.' Red Hat's CTO, Brian Stevens, said the move would remove the complex 'rocket science' aspect of virtualization, and drive the technology into more enterprises as a result."
This is great news. I'm currently involved in a rollout of Red Hat Enterprise for a large Govt Department in Western Australia and we have had to make extensive use of VMWare's ESX. Having Xen in RH would streamline our development process and make a Red Hat ES development environment more attractive for large enterprise use.
You sound like a bitter, bitter Slashdotter.
This "Fedora's a beta testbed for suckers" stuff is utter crap. Fedora is a testbed not for stability, but for cutting edge technologies that may filter down into Enterprise many months later. And from what I hear, FC5 will introduce some exciting new things. The stuff that goes in isn't generally any more unstable or poorly-built that the pristine sources from which it derives, plus you've got the support of the community and the Bugzilla.
The Fedoras are nice, powerful distributions. Far nicer (and to be honest, I think more polised) than Enterprise. For me, they've got the right balance of modern usability and technical accessibility. Yes, I like cutting edge.
It's a hosted solution; I only have access to the guest OS. The solution is advertised as Xen 3.0.1. I don't know the storage system. I didn't have performance issues; I just ran unixbench and saw that it took a LONG time, see the results here: unix_bench_xen_budgetdedicated.
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To me, one kernel is an advantage, not a limitation. A kernel upgrade on a VServer box is a one-step operation, whereas on a Xen (or like) you have to repeat it for every guest.
Also a great thing about VServer is that the filesystem can be shared between host ang guest. So I can run one backup on the host, which takes care of all the guests.
Another thing I like is the ability to "enter" a guest from the host by simply switching the context - no need to actually log in.
And the virtualized loopback and iptables is just a matter of time - the alpha branches of VServer already have it.
I should also mention that aside from Vserver there is something called OpenVZ, which is the same concept and more features. What turns me off about OpenVZ and Xen is that the community around these projects is commercially sustained, which means that the project evolution will gravitate in a direction that satisfies shareholders and that the project would be greatly impacted by a business failure (which happens quite often these days).
Vserver on the other hand is a truly indepndent open source community, very much like the communities that drive other most succesful projects out there. I've been following this project for a couple of years now, things may not move as fast, but folks are involved out of the love for technology, and the quality of the software reflects this.
I haven't really been able to find much information on this, so maybe you know: with Xen 3 and the VT extentions does the guest OS still need special drivers? It seems to me that there would still be a performance advantage to having special drivers rather than having to virtualize devices. But maybe there's some clever trick in the VT extensions that I'm not taking into account.
Most Linux users aren't running mission critical servers, but are doing much more interesting things. True, Linux is my choice of OS for running web servers, mail, DNS and the like, but that's hardly important stuff. The really interesting stuff is to be had in the multimedia and desktop arenas and that's where Xen is truly the better performer. I'd far rather run my home remote desktop server on Xen and be able to have my desktop ALWAYS on via VNC even if I have to take the hardware down rather than have a PC for each user in the house. I'd also like to know that my CPU cycles are being well used rather than wasted on emulating parts of a system that really work better when virtualized. Don't get me wrong, things like QEMU have their place. I use it extensively for building VMs before porting them to Xen. I also use it for testing out ISOs of new distros. Hell, I'm even currently running my home web server/mail server/DNS server on QEMU and it's smashingly good. But that was done only to free up the original box that installation sat on. I moved the entire installation to QEMU just using rsync so that I retained everything I'd worked hard on in the VM image. I only needed to make a few tweaks (different NIC). But that was done so I could set my box up with Xen and migrate to new, more MOBILE VMs. That is the key. Xen is much more mobile. It takes just a few minutes to get an entirely new VM running and completely with the feel of a real server running at the native speed of the physical host. No slowdowns at all.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o