> From: [email protected] [mailto:discuss- > [email protected]] On Behalf Of Greg Rundlett > (freephile) > > I find it > helpful to be given a list of related technologies, starting with a > 'native' to free software hypervisor so as to be familiar with the system > from the bare metal up. If there are advantages to using a particular > hypervisor, or new developments that make solution X interesting, then that > would be a good discussion for this list. Right?
That is a good discussion, but it's really a separate discussion. Chuck's comment was: > It seems many people haven't heard of the built-in native > virtualization technology on Linux and it's management stack as > supported by Red Hat & developed and released first on Fedora. It is > called KVM for Kernel-based Virtual Machine, and the userspace > component of it uses QEmu to provide the hardware access, BIOS > emulation, etc. The whole thing is managed by the libvirtd daemon, > libvirt library, command shell virsh, and installer virt-install. > libvirt actually supports managing KVM, Xen, QEmu, LXC, OpenVZ, > VirtualBox and VMware ESX (or so the virsh manpage claims). So my first reaction is this: Before there was kvm, there was xen. And to this day, they both still exist and going strong. But I think redhat and debian (Or Linus? Somebody) didn't like the direction xen was going (or something like that) so a couple years ago, they switched over to kvm by default instead of xen. Most distros also include a standard package for virtualbox, although, it's generally not installed. You have to "yum install" or whatever for your platform ... And even then, I prefer to download the package directly from virtualbox.org instead of using the one that's in the OS package repository. Because I use the virtualbox oracle extensions, and it's important to always keep the GPL product (virtualbox) in-sync with the version of Oracle extensions, I find it easier to just always download the virtualbox package along with the oracle extensions package, simultaneously (and always archive together.) I have never been very impressed with either xen or kvm, unless you're doing paravirtualization, linux guest inside linux host. Even then, there are some shortcomings that I don't really want to get into ... I will say this: If you have a guest VM running on some hypervisor, then switching to a different hypervisor is often a complete pain. One of the big reasons I like to use virtualbox is because you can run it on any host, and that makes my VM's very easily migratable between different host OSes. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
