[wellylug] Xen and Windows

Jethro Carr jethro.carr at jethrocarr.com
Sun Aug 16 22:11:46 NZST 2009


On Sun, 2009-08-16 at 21:33 +1200, William Hamilton wrote:
> I am looking at putting some time into Xen as a couple of clients are
> making noises about virtualisation blah blah.  Having had a quick read
> I see that Windows is not greatly supported unless the processor has
> virtualisation built in.  

"not greatly supported" is a bit of an understatement, the only way to
run non-paravirtualised operating systems like Xen is with a CPU with
hardware virtualisation (Intel-VT or AMD-V).


> Anyone here doing a mix of Linux/Windows on Xen? (one particular
> client has a Windows app they cannot get rid of at this stage).  Any
> recomendations on hardware?  A number of my boxes are SuperMicro 1U
> and 2U which I have had good experiences with.

Never done Windows on Xen before, I only run Linux VMs (mix of
para-virtualised and hardware-virtualised instances), have used the AMD
Phenom X4 a lot, seems to deliver very good performance.

Take care when buying Intel CPUs, not all of their CPUs have hardware
virtualisation (in particular the entry level ones).

Also, be careful when choosing motherboards - a good server vendor
should have virtualisation support, but I've seen many motherboards
without any support for virtualisation.

This means even if you buy a CPU with hardware virtualisation, the lack
of the motherboard support makes it useless... been caught out with this
once before when buying a Gigabyte board.

The problem isn't helped thanks to most of the motherboard manufacturers
not listing whether virtualisation is a feature in their tech specs.


regards,
jethro

-- 
Jethro Carr
www.jethrocarr.com/index.php?cms=blog
www.amberdms.com
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