On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 12:42:03PM -0800, yary wrote:
> Hello,
>
> wondering what state-of-the-art is for running virtual machines under
> OpenBSD. I don't see anything with particularly good performance (like
> Solairs "zones"), which would be great, but anything resonable would
> work for my purposes- I don't really need the blazing speed. I want to
> run a few virutal OpenBSD servers under my "real" OpenBSD 4.0 server
> for testing and some light work, and am wondering about
> qemu/bochs/other choices?
>
> If you're using virtual-OpenBSDs under real-OpenBSD, let me know your
> preferred setup!
For real virtual stuff, qemu works well - although not exactly swiftly.
It's usable for testing, but don't try to run it in production.
If you can handle being a little less virtual, chroot + systrace allows
you to build specialized mini-systems with good security and
performance. This can be rather useful for running, for instance,
several disconnected daemons on a single server; OTOH, it's completely
useless if you are trying to do kernel development work. So it depends
on what you are trying to do; however, since very few of those
virtualization systems will allow you to run a different kernel from the
one you are running on the host, this is not that big a loss.
Finally, while OpenBSD does not run many virtualization environments, it
does run *in* most virtualization environments. At least VMWare should
work, and Xen is being developed [1].
Joachim
[1] Or might be ready, or might be abandoned - I'm afraid I'm not
certain here.
