Great topic. I actually this could be a good meeting topic for December. But, a few notes.
1. VMWare isn't open source. It's the hands-down leader in Virtualization though. Their server product is good. Their ESX lines is enterprise-grade. My compnay has millions of dollars being processed on it daily. The updsides of VMware: * Good management tools (simple, GUI) * Good API (not so simple, but very rich) * Industry leading (3rd party integrations all over the place) * Excellent Windows support * Many features require use of storage medium as files and not native disk (I think NFS is the only native-disk type allowed, or pass-thru LUNs) * Clustering , HA and load distribution are all quite mature Downsides: * Everything they do, they do for Windows VMs first ( and sometimes only). I can elaborate on this a bunch, but I don't have a couple hours for it right now. * No paravirt for Linux (Linux isn't aware it's virtualized, so it's all fully emulated/HW accelerated stuff like Pacifica, and Intel VM (I think that's the name of it) * Expensive for ESX 2. Xen. I am mostly familiar with Xen on Fedora/CentOS/RHEL. It's quite nice. I use it quite a lot at home and with the Fedora Project. Upsides: * Open Source ( I think it's now in the vanilla kernel, but I could be wrong there) * Paravirt -- Linux Vms inside xen that are aware they are virtualized will normally outperform full-virt VMs (VMware, some KVM, etc) * Can cheapen subscription costs for RHEL (4 VMs allowsed per host, or unlimited depending on needs) * Usable through libvirt (Fedora, Ubuntu, and RHEL based stuff all use libvirt as the primary API for talking to Xen and now KVM) * Does not require HW virtualization extensions * Windows can run on full-virt (I think. I don't really do Windows, so I am speculating) * Can use Native Disks instead of files (can also do files) Downsides * Less good GUI/Management tools * Less 3rd party tools 3. KVM. Again, I have only used this with Fedora. Upsides: * No patched kernel (though Xen might be upstream now) * Everybody seems to be saying it's the future * Libvirt Downsides: * Not a lot of documentation yet * Requires hardware with virt extensions If you want to play with KVM as an appliance (like esx) you can check out http://ovirt.org/ --> that's Red Hat's KVM appliance OS. It's free to download (and open source) I haven't played with VirtualBox. I saw that Debian/RH were having some licensing concerns with it even now that Sun 'opened' it. VirtualIron -- never touched. stahnma --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
