Most Popular Virtualization

[mark_smith]

Hey Guys, I was wondering, if you could suggest when to use KVM virtualization, Xen and VMWare. Which one do you think is the most popular among the various virtualization offerings in the market. Appreciate your help folks. Thanks.

 

[steviewdr]

Well there are plenty of docs out there on this. See:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9867657-39.html

http://www.techthrob.com/2009/03/02/virtualization-in-linux-a-review-of-four-software-choices/

 

If your looking for personal opinions, here is mine:

I use xen myself on my production servers. I like it a lot. I have found a few minor issues with it, and these issues required some research to solve.

I used vmware on my desktop pc for running virtual machines. Vmware provided a lot of flexibility. It was super easy to use. AFAIK vmware server is free.

 

What do you want to do on your Virtual machine? Do you want a X graphics server? Games etc?

I use xen with virtual machines for servers with console only. Xen requires the virtual machine to run a modified kernel. If can run windows and any os as a guest vm, however you need a modern cpu with virtualisation support. As I said, xen requires a bit of bashing to get into shape.

 

As the saying goes: Different Horses for different courses. I suggest you google more. I also suggest you setup and test a few versions and see for yourself.

 

-steve

[gizmola]

Hey Guys, I was wondering, if you could suggest when to use KVM virtualization, Xen and VMWare. Which one do you think is the most popular among the various virtualization offerings in the market. Appreciate your help folks. Thanks.

 

It comes down to what you are going to use virtualization for.  If it's a workstation, then VMWare player or workstation, Sun Virtualbox, or if on Linux KVM are worth looking at, as they are all designed to allow you to run virtualization on top of your existing OS.  These days it's very important to have a chip that includes virtualization instructions  (Intel VT or AMD-V) and essential if you want to run a virtualized 64bit os.  KVM requires it, while some of the other products can run on older chips with the virtualization instructions, but only 32 bit os's.

 

If you're talking about a server, then typically you're looking at a virtualization OS like Xen or OpenVZ, where you are no longer booting your original OS.  In the case of Xen, it runs paravirtualized OS's with very little overhead, because the guest os has been altered to take advantage of the Xen os.  OpenVX is very popular with hosting companies because it offers high performance with very little overhead, although it isn't so much virtualization as a chrooted environment. 

 

The real question is what you want virtualization for.  Without knowing that, it's hard to advise which products fits your needs the best.