Desperately Seeking Xen

AlexGr sends us to an excellent article on the state of Xen by Jeff Gould (Peerstone Research). He concludes that the virtualization technology has some maturing to do and will face increasing competition for the privilege of taking on VMWare. Quoting: "What's going on with Xen, the open source hypervisor that was supposed to give VMware a run for its money? I can't remember how many IT trade press articles, blog posts and vendor white papers I've read about Xen in the last few years... The vast majority of those articles — including a few I've written myself — take it as an article of faith that Xen's paravirtualizing technical approach and open source business model are inherently superior to the closed source alternatives from VMware or Microsoft."

Comments

Re:Need a special processor

[Mostly a lurker]

It is true that Xen requires special hardware to legally run MS Windows. It is also better for performance, generally, to have such hardware. However, there is nothing stopping you from running Xen on pretty much any computer you are likely to own as long as the VMs are Linux based.

Re:what went wrong is

[stevey]

Not true.

If you have VT-capable hardware then you can run Windows under Xen. You do need the hardware to support it though, and that is a problem for some home users. Recent AMD and Intel chips have slightly differing VT support but both work.

I run Xen at home along with xen-tools (which I wrote) to easily create new Debian guests on demand. These are used for software testing, hacking, and general service isolation.

I think Xen is just now reaching "mainstream" in the sense that you don't have to be an early adoptor or major tinkerer to get it working. Now that distributions are including Xen kernels in their newer releases it really us available for all.

Re:vm ware

[gtrubetskoy]

Except that OpenVZ is a better way to go in that case. For fairness it should be mentioned that aside from OpenVZ there is also Linux VServer which does a few things better than OpenVZ (though OpenVZ does some things it does not). Our preference has always been VServer, it's a well-run project with emphasis on quality and well thought through design rather than quantity.

Guaranteed Results

[catdevnull]

If you want to get a colorful thread of comments started on slashdot, there are 3 ways to do it with guaranteed results:

1) Say something bad about linux (or about Apple).

2) Say something good about Microsoft (or about Apple).

3) Throw a grenade in the room about Open Source software like this:

The vast majority of those articles -- including a few I've written myself -- take it as an article of faith that Xen's paravirtualizing technical approach and open source business model are inherently superior to the closed source alternatives from VMware or Microsoft.

I'm not making any value judgements here--I'm just amused.

Re:Xen "Just Works" (I know. I use it every day)

[div_2n]

The only exception is the deployment of Zimbra I'm going to do. It requires Redhat Enterprise Linux 4 and NPTL

Last I checked, Zimbra runs on Ubuntu 6 just fine.

Re:Xen "Just Works" (I know. I use it every day)

[eno2001]

It depends on what I'm doing. If you weren't trying to be cute, I'd say you were trolling. In reality, it's very common practice to use LVM to clone a filesystem, make some changes to the various files that set IP and hostname as well as other unique host settings and bring up alternate "Test" VMs on a Xen box. So some days I might be running three VMs other days eight or ten. It all depends on what I need to do.

As an aside, I forgot to mention that there are NO other products other than VMWare ESX that offer "live migration" of a running VM from one hardware host to another. That's right... you can take a VM that is running with many users actively using it and move it from one physical box to another with only a few milliseconds down time. The users NEVER notice. The free VMWare server can't do that. Micrsoft's Virtual Server can't do that until they have a hypervisor. And there really isn't anything else that can.