Think of xen as running OSes "side-by-side", with one OS more equal than the other. Then think of vmware as a heirarchy, with your guest OS's resources way below that of your master OS. Xen will obviously allow the two OSes to have more equal access to the hardware resources, and won't provide a virtualization-bottleneck that is seen with vmware. Once the technologies develop, I'm pretty sure Xen (or xen-like programs) are the future. The good thing about VMWare though, is if an image of your server works under VMWare on one computer, it'll work on VMWare on any computer, whereas your server under Xen will need to support the actual hardware (with drivers, etc), just as much as your master OS has to.
On 9/29/06, John Oliver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 12:55:56AM -0700, Tracy R Reed wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Lan Barnes wrote: > > Any youse guys using Xen? Anyone willing to compare it with VMWare? > > > > How does Xen stack up as an alternative to a dual boot? > > I have been using it for a year. Xen is para-virtualization, VMware is > full virtualization. Xen will be faster but requires modified guest OS > unless you have a new Intel/AMD cpu which supports virtualization in > which case it will run any x86 OS. Xen rocks. I am moving my entire > company to Xen. CPU's are vastly underutilized running just one OS > instance per box. We expect to be able to reduce our overall machine > count over the next year (saving power and datacenter space) while > continuing to grow the business. And Xen's ability to migrate running > virtual machines from one physical box to another with no downtime > (requires a SAN such as AoE, iSCSI, fibrechannel) it should greatly > increase our availability as well. If you are dual-booting between Linux > and Windows Xen won't do it for you unless you have a new cpu that > supports the virtualization extensions. You will also have to choose > which OS you want to have the graphical console (the other you will have > to access through vnc or some similar hack) because they haven't > virtualized it yet but that is coming. I cannot yet conceptualize the difference between Xen and VMWare :-) When and why would I want to use one instead of the other? -- *********************************************************************** * John Oliver http://www.john-oliver.net/ * * * *********************************************************************** -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
-- Nicholas Wheeler Systems Administrator Development InfoStructure -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
