http://opensourcegeek.org/2009/11/10/vmware-left-me/ Days in the life of an aging, open source geek Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:19:13 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 http://opensourcegeek.org/2009/11/10/vmware-left-me/comment-page-1/#comment-46 Imran-UK Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:55:41 +0000 http://opensourcegeek.org/?p=260#comment-46 We use Xen at work, it's pretty good and very efficient. The guests run very fast with little or no overhead. If you want a GUI though to manage it then I'm not the guy to advise other than to probably look at the Citrix Xen product. We use Xen in a hosted environment and manage it and the guests with the command line. It's totally manageable that way though. If you hang out on the #xen IRC Freenode channel you become aware of some extremely cool stuff going on in Xen - there is a project called Remus that provides failover for a Xen guest - not only is the disc kept in sync but the memory, TCP conns, everything! It's aim is to failover as if nothing happended to the original guest. It's just been merged into mainline Xen and will be in the next release. I keep hearing good things about KVM - it's big advantage over Xen is that it's implemented as a kernel module - thus your KVM machine gets all the mainline kernel updates too. Xen requires a specialized kernel and thus the guests need to be patched to run with that kernel. Anyhow, keep us updated on which you go with and why - oh, and describe the GUI management stuff too! We use Xen at work, it’s pretty good and very efficient. The guests run very fast with little or no overhead. If you want a GUI though to manage it then I’m not the guy to advise other than to probably look at the Citrix Xen product. We use Xen in a hosted environment and manage it and the guests with the command line. It’s totally manageable that way though.
If you hang out on the #xen IRC Freenode channel you become aware of some extremely cool stuff going on in Xen – there is a project called Remus that provides failover for a Xen guest – not only is the disc kept in sync but the memory, TCP conns, everything! It’s aim is to failover as if nothing happended to the original guest. It’s just been merged into mainline Xen and will be in the next release.
I keep hearing good things about KVM – it’s big advantage over Xen is that it’s implemented as a kernel module – thus your KVM machine gets all the mainline kernel updates too. Xen requires a specialized kernel and thus the guests need to be patched to run with that kernel.
Anyhow, keep us updated on which you go with and why – oh, and describe the GUI management stuff too!

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