Re: Virtualization, was Re: Unable to install Redhat 5.0 on my laptop

On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 23:21:35 +0000, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

General Schvantzkopf wrote:

WMware Server is the one with a thin hypervisor based on RHEL 3 and a
2.4 kernel? Or is that a different product? I'm having trouble digging
through all the twisty little product descriptions to see which is
which.

VMware has a product, I think it's ESX Server, that's based on some
version of RHEL with VMWare on top. VMWare Server runs on current
kernels. It runs fine on older systems that lack hardware
virtualization support but the performance is significantly better on
Core2s that have hardware virtualization support. Xen seems to be
frozen in place. On Fedora it's tied to the 2.6.21 kernel. I think
that's a Redhat issue more than a Xen issue and that there are plans to
change it in Fedora 9. However XenSource was bought by Citrix which is
bad news for Xen. Citrix is a Windows shop. What's more they are very
careful to stay on Microsoft's good side. VMware is mostly owned by EMC
which is an enterprise storage company, so it doesn't have any
conflicts. VirtualBox is the other choice that works (Parallels
doesn't, it's absolutely unusable on Linux). VirtualBox was just bought
by Sun. Sun has been schizophrenic about Linux, but they seem to be
more commited to it these days. The problem with VirtualBox is that a
VM is limited to 2G of RAM which is a showstopper for me but not for
everyone. VMWare Server 1.0.4 is limited to 3.6G and VMware Server 2
supports 8G.


I recently had a very good meeting with Xen sales and support reps, so
it seems to be an active market, and they're selling very reasonable
tools and support packages. VMware can't seem to be bothered with my
calls or letters about only 3 licenses, even though it's for corporate
use. I swear, they seem to hve hired DEC's old "anti-sales" people.

Any idea where VMware Workstation compares to VMware Server? I tested
out VMware Workstation on RHEL 5 and it handled SCO Openserver for me,
which was what I needed.

I haven't used Workstation. In looking at the feature list it seems that
the big difference is that Workstation supports 8G of memory, Server
1.0.4 only 3.6, and Workstation can mount a host directory as a disk,
Server relies on NFS to access host directories. Server 2 supports 8G but
it still can't mount a host directory. The IO performance is the weak
point of VMware Server, my measurements show that copying a large
directory in a VM is 10X slower than doing it on the host. The overall
application performance in VMware Server is pretty close to native unless
there is a lot of IO. I don't know if the IO performance in Workstation
is significantly better than Server's.

.

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