Desperately Seeking Xen

Posted by kdawson on Thursday June 28, 2007 @02:32AM from the whither-the-gorilla-killer dept.

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."

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Re:what went wrong is by stevey · 2007-06-28 02:56 · Score: 5, Informative

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.