Steve Kemp wrote:
> On Sun Apr 12, 2009 at 21:21:26 +0100, Brian Chivers wrote:
>
>
>> I'm starting to look at virtualisation but I know very little about it.
>> I've read a bit about Xen & KVM and have had several companies visit
>> College drumming on about VMWare (very expensive but nice features) & M$
>> HyperV(quite cheap for education). I would really like to stay open
>> source but I need to read more about this as it'll be for "business
>> critical" systems so stability, flexibility and easy management will be
>> very important.
>>
>
> The management is where most of the open solutions fall down.
>
> Your choices are probably going to be:
>
> uml - obsolete
> xen - heavyweight. waning support.
> qemu/kvm - fast. regular updates.
> vmware - closed source. good reputation
> openbox - ?
>
>
> UML is only useful for hosting Linux guests on a Linux host, and
> while it has performance problems it is very stable and simple to get
> started with.
>
> Xen is an oddity - at one point it looked like it was going to take
> the world by storm. Since it failed to get integrated into the
> mainline kernel it has suffered a lot, and to be honest these days I'd
> ignore it as a stagnant irrelevancy.
>
> KVM builds upon the stunningly featureful Qemu software, and adds a
> kernel-based driver which boosts performance. It is very easy to get
> started with, and has the bonus that if you're running a recent kernel
> you probably have over half the software you need already present.
>
> VMWare have made a lot of their lower-end software available for
> free, but it isn't open source. If you only one one-ten guests then it
> works very well, but if you want to use it heavily you're going to miss
> the nice admin tools they have - as they're still commercial.
>
> Openbox I've never used, so I cannot comment. But people do say nice
> things about it.
>
> In short if you don't care about the closed nature then VMWare has
> always had a nice reputation, and if you want to be open-source
> friendly then I'd strongly recommend KVM. (Or openbox; can't recommend
> it as I've never tried it.)
>
> In all cases though your biggest problem will be the admin side, tools
> to create, manage, control, and copy the guests are lacking in the open
> world.
>
> Right now, for example, my KVM guests are running inside GNU Screen
> which is functional but hardly very attractive. Still for most of the
> basic tools kvm, qemu, lguest and uml the basic process is very
> similar:
>
> 1. Create a volume "dd if=/dev/zero of=path/to/disk.img bs=1024 count=8192k"
>
> 2. Launch the software pointing at the virtual disk
> kvm -hda /var/kvm/etch64.security.build.img ...
>
> 3. Setup appropriate networking support.
>
> Each of these operations is very well documented, so you probably
> don't need a book. Just pick one of the packages and read the
> documentation. (VMWare/OpenBox are more GUI applications so you might
> try those first if you're hazy on the command line stuff.)
>
> Steve
> --
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>
>
>
Thanks guys I'll have a play and see how I get on.
Brian
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The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily
the views of Portsmouth College
