Edward Ned Harvey <[email protected]> writes: > > First, in my experience, all 'full virtualization' products suck. > > They are slow and buggy. I only support paravirtualized kernels. > > Correct me if I'm wrong, but paravirtualized you can only run similar guest > OSes, right? What if your host is Linux, and you need a Windows Server > guest? I think this is something that can only be done fully virtualized.
The only way I know how to run windows under linux, or linux under windows is to use full virtualization, yes. You may wish to check out project satori. it lets you run linux guests on the microsoft hypervisor. No idea how well it works, or how well the microsoft hypervisor works. http://www.xen.org/products/satori.html There is no reason why paravirtualized OSs need to be similar; I'm happily running OpenSolaris, NetBSD and Linux guests under xen. But they do need to be paravirtualized to work under Xen, and that's probably not ever going to happen to windows. > > The commercial xenserver product might be worth a shot if you really > > need graphical tools. It's free, I hear, for the basic version. But > > the management console is windows only. > > It's not so much that I really need graphical tools - But how else can you > get the gui console of the guest OS? Suppose the guest is unavailable for > some reason via ssh/rdp/vnc. Then you need the actual console of the guest, > to either fix the problem or reboot the guest, and the only way I know of is > to get inside something like VMM or VMware Console Client. Do you know > another way? I'm aware of VNC console, but it's not secure enough to leave > it normally-on, and I don't think you can temporarily enable it while the > guest is already running. the 'xm console' virtual serial console is what I use. But then, I don't use graphical guests, so a emulated serial console is actually better than an emulated crt. The only thing I'd reccomend is ssh port forwarding and the VNC console... that way you could access the vnc console (which looks like the video card to the guest) remotely, but you only have ssh open to the outside. > > But, in my opinion, graphical tools are overrated. xm is really the > > only > > management tool you need. > > This is again, a place where maybe you know something I don't know - > How can you eject a CD via xm command, and then insert a different CD > without shutting down the guest OS? You should be able to do it with xm block-attach block-attach domain-id be-dev fe-dev mode [bedomain-id] Create a new virtual block device. This will trigger a hotplug event for the guest. and xm block-detach block-detach domain-id devid [--force] Detach a domain’s virtual block device. devid may be the symbolic name or the numeric device id given to the device by domain 0. You will need to run xm block-list to determine that number. Works fine for adding/removing disks to running paravirtualized guests. I don't remember last time I tried doing this on a HVM guest or what the results were, but it should work. -- Luke S. Crawford http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - We don't assume you are stupid. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
