[wellylug] virtualisation options?

Peter Lambrechtsen plambrechtsen at gmail.com
Thu Mar 12 16:01:26 NZDT 2009


On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 3:33 PM, Daniel Pittman <daniel at rimspace.net> wrote:
> Peter Lambrechtsen <plambrechtsen at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I would chose VMware every time.  The ease you can move VM's between a
>> Windows/Linux host is just too easy, plus VMServer is free and a very
>> solid app.
>
> Given the dependencies and pain of VMWare Server 2 I couldn't recommend
> it to anyone, absent the non-free nature of the tool.

It's free as in beer, not free as in freedom...  I have had stock Suse
boxes install using the RPM version of VMWare server very painlessly.
Haven't installed it on Ubuntu... but I would assume it would be
similar.

>> There is XEN or VirtualBox from Sun.  Both are ok, Virtual Box is
>> getting a whole lot better for end-user UI
>
> ...but still has trouble with accurate CPU emulation, at least in some
> versions.  When the Linux kernel started using "long nop" sequences for
> various purposes this showed that your choices for accurate CPU
> emulation were KVM and VMWare — everything else fell down...

Agreed.

>> XEN is extremely fast due to it only being a hypervisor running on
>> your existing kernel.
>
> Xen performance with hardware virtualization (eg: any Windows) is
> indistinguishable from VMWare, KVM, or any other solution.
>
> That is to say, performance is entirely dependent on the quality of the
> paravirtualized drivers you have, for which there are limited free (as
> in beer, or as in freedom) options available.

The Novell "free as in beer" paravirtualised XEN drivers for windows
32 & 64 bit have seen me very well the times I have run it in
production environments.  You don't get the nice "signed by M$" during
the install, but apart from that they have worked for me a treat, and
had extremely good network performance from them once loaded without
impacting Dom0

>> But to run XP you would need a CPU that supports virtualsation.  Which
>> on a stock laptop may not be able to do it.
>
> *nod*  This is the biggest limitation of getting *good* emulation; on
> that basis VMWare is the least awful fallback choice, I would say, if
> you can't run KVM.

Agreed on the "good" statement... I consider VMWare the most
portable... with performance being the tradeoff.  Otherwise get a
compatible CPU and you will be fine.

For some who can't part with Windows for various reasons (like
employer preventing it), VMWare (server or workstation) offers a great
solution where you can have your VM's on a USB Drive, and easily
transition from a Windows Host and a Linux Host with very little
reconfiguration of the VM.



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