2009/3/18 Sridhar Dhanapalan <[email protected]>: > We're getting a new box at work to host virtual machines, and I'm > trying to figure out what the best virtualisation solution might be. > The specs will very likely be a dual quad-core CPU with 32GB RAM, > running CentOS. > > I'd like to have something that: > > * is FOSS > * is easy to manage (I've got other responsibilities and don't want to > be bogged down with sysadmin work) > * can preferably also run on our Fedora 8 desktops, so we can share VM images > * can support a wide variety of guest OSs (especially Linux, Windows > and Solaris)
I don't have much experience with the other options but I think a good point in favour of Xen is that it comes built in with CentOS 5 and so is supported - you don't have to keep looking for updates, security patches, compatibility issues or anything - you just keep your yum-updatesd running and that's it. I don't remember how long it took me to learn but I think I got things up and running in less than a day and we've been building and running hundreds of xen guests using very simple scripts and config files for the last 18 months or so. I think it's a good strategy to try to stick to whatever comes with your (supported) distro, in the name of keeping things simple. Eventually RH promises a migration path to KVM, which should arrive in 5.4. Cheers, --Amos -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
