VMware, XenSource Join Forces For Linux

porjo writes "Peace has been established on at least one front: XenSource and VMware are working together to improve virtualization in the Linux kernel. Their original disagreement has been displaced by a commitment to work on a solution together, says Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource, the company that builds products around Xen virtualization software. The two are trying to come up with a common approach to virtualization support in the Linux kernel. [snip] The work now under way would let hypervisors from Microsoft, VMware, and Xen work together in the same data center. Under such a scenario, it would be possible for a Xen virtual machine, trapped on a piece of failing hardware, to be automatically moved over to a VMware hypervisor on another piece of hardware."

Comments

This reminds me of Ghost in the Shell.

[supasam]

Maybe some day we'll only power down our computers after uploading them-still running-to an off site server to continue their existence. An then some day those never ending processes can mate and have children.

Will it be so universal?

[stas2k]

Now this is great news! As VMware user on production systems, I am very pleased with such news. Now one of many thing that can go wrong in such "alliance" as that hypervisor interface will get bloated with vendor specific extensions. And we will end up with non-compatible interfaces as it was before.

Re:Which systems support Windows clients?

[Trelane]

There seem to be a range of choices if I want Linux client OS, including Xen, VMWare, User-Mode Linux, etc., and some for BSD client OS, but is the VMWare server for Linux the only free choice if I want to support Windows clients?

At this level, it is because Microsoft VirtualPC doesn't support a Linux host, Xen requires modifications that (apparently) they can't legally use with a Windows client, UML is User Mode Linux (not Windows) and requires kernel-level modifications (obviously unavailable outside of Redmond, WA, USA), and Win4Lin has no free offering. (These are the only ones I'm familiar with) With Hypervisor, however, Xen no longer requires the legally-questionable mods, so there's hope for the future if you don't like VMWare. So, the answers seem to be: lack of support, lack of free, and lack of source.

Otherwise, there're technologies like Bochs, which emulate the actual chip, but are much slower.

Re:Which systems support Windows clients?

[JamesTRexx]

Virtual PC can run Linux distros, you just have to try it. I've had Gentoo run and livecd's based on FreeBSD (PC-BSD and DesktopBSD) and OpenBSD (OliveBSD).
And there's also Qemu which is available for *nix and Windows. Together with the kqemu accelerator it runs Windows very fast on *nix and vice-versa.
(currently running Windows in Qemu on FreeBSD 6, Ubuntu 6.06 desktop in VMware server on Windows XP and Windows in VMware server on Ubuntu 6.06 desktop)

Re:Which systems support Windows clients?

[spectro]

Xen requires modifications that (apparently) they can't legally use with a Windows client

I understand Xen 3.0.2 can run unmodified windows guests if you have a processor with virtualization extensions (Intel Pentium D 9xx series, or AMD Athlon 64 X2 Windsor series). I am planning to try this out but I need a few months to shell out the $400+ to buy new cpu, mobo, video and DDR2 memory.

Re:What's virtualisation for?

[McGiraf]

"Can someone explain to ignorant old me what linux-on-linux virtualisation is for? What problem does it solve?"

It's for running linux on linux, it solves linux not running on linux.

Hape that helps.