Re: [Xen-users] Xen in Linux distributions

[Grant McWilliams <grantmasterflash@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 8:12 AM, Gerry Reno <greno@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 07/02/2010 10:50 AM, Bart Coninckx wrote:

RedHat's trategy is clear: phase out Xen and phase in KVM. Centos will follow
obviously. Haw fast this process will take place is nothing to worry about if
you ask me. Unless you are not ready to change at any point of course.

B.

 

I see this a huge mistake on the part of RedHat.  Only Type-1, bare-metal virtualization, such as Xen makes sense for enterprise deployments.  Sure, if you want to provide the Linux desktop user with some virtualization then KVM might make sense.  But RedHat is losing ground in the desktop arena already so why bother.  You have major players such as Amazon that currently use RedHat and Xen bare-metal virtualization in their public cloud offering.  You have complementary private cloud technologies such as Eucalyptus which also support Xen so you can mirror Amazon.  And I see that trend growing.  Once a distro like RedHat can use a dom0/domU shared kernel (which hasn't been since F8 and probably drove them to purchase Qumranet) then Xen usage for even the casual desktop user becomes much easier.  The new pv_ops kernels are now providing just that possibility once again.

Gerry

I don't think KVM will have a technical disadvantage in the long run no matter how many "buzz words" we throw around and it will be integrated but currently it doesn't do what Xen does nor is it as fast in most instances. Xen will be moving toward hybrid virtualization where everything thats faster with full virt will be fully virtualized and everything else paravirtualized. This will mean it will look like HVM in most cases. This is different from how KVM and HVM work now where a few things are hardware virtualized, most emulated and a couple paravirtualized.

Ultimately in the end the hypervisor won't matter. Already we are choosing a hypervisor based on management tools.

Grant McWilliams

Some people, when confronted 
with a problem, think "I know, I'll use Windows." 
Now they have two 
problems.

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