On Wed Jul 15, 2009 at 12:58:34 +0100, Dr A. J. Trickett wrote:
> 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.
It does seem to suffer from being so new though. I've certainly
seen problems where heavy network IO will take down a guest unless
you're running a very very recent kernel.
> 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.
[I work for Bytemark but I'm not saying anything that isn't already
public!]
Bytemark hosted for many years based upon UML, and you're correct
that these days if you rent a virtual machine it will be KVM-based.
We had a brief trial of Xen but didn't find it ready for the prime
time at the point the trial occurred. Later it did seem reliable,
robust, and so on but we never switched to it for customer machines
just for some of our internal systems.
I'm with the later poster who suggested virtualisation is essentially
a commodity at this point. KVM looks good at the moment, and the other
in-kernel option is Rusty's lguest - I've only toyed with that but
again its a nice simple system with a lot of flexibility.
Xen? I think is destined for the sideline until it makes it fully
into the kernel, and by then? I think it'll be overtaken.
Steve
--
http://www.steve.org.uk/
