On Wednesday 15 Jul 2009, Andy Smith wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 09:38:01PM +0100, Peter Brooks wrote:
> > KVM I will look into too, some reports say it's not too mature
> > yet but it's worth checking out (I'd actually forgotten about
> > it until you mentioned it again).
>
> In my experience KVM has the most chance of not encountering bizarre
> problems that no upstream can/will take on. I believe Bytemark are
> using it for their VM offering now, which was a big milestone.
KVM is interesting, it's in the mainline kernel and Xen is not. The firm
behind KVM is now part of Red Hat and the firm behind Xen is Citrix (a
big Microsoft partner).
The userland part of KVM is mostly Qemu which is pretty mature already
so I'd say that while KVM is very new, it has grown up quickly and it's
still moving forward. I get the feeling that Xen is losing ground and
going out of fashion.
I think ByteMark went from User Mode Linux to KVM for their virtual
systems and now deploy KVM rather than Xen as their default way of
chopping a new system up. I gather that KVM is easier to work with - but
that's just a feeling I have no objective data to back it up.
> > The VM host will need to host windows and linux systems.
>
> I'd not discount VMWare then.
If you pay your money then VMWare does have a good reputation, but it's
not perfect.
I currently use:
VirtualBox on the desktop because it's dead easy and supports GUIs on
the client system very well.
KQemu/Qemu on my server because it's stable and fast.
I tried VirtualBox on the server but it kept crashing in Debian Lenny,
where Qemu was rock solid. My desktop systems run Squeeze okay though.
Recently I tried KVM on my server, which was awkward to get going
(permissions problems), but once I had it running it seems very similar
to KQemu in stability and performance.
--
Adam Trickett
Overton, HANTS, UK
I never really understood how there could be things that would
drive you insane just because you knew them until I ran into Windows.
-- anon
