----- "Lan Barnes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > OK, all you xen bashers from last week -- have at it!
Xen has its place -- virtualizing many instances of a supported OS whose kernel can be modified to allow paravirtualization... a.k.a. Linux. It works really well in that case. Where Xen falls down is in virtualizing other OSes. Windows under Xen works, but the performance is crap unless closed-source paravirtual drivers for network and disk are installed. FreeBSD is apparently not very well tested under Xen, or at least is having trouble keeping up with Xen's rapid development cycle. The BSD problem was the source of the original Xen rant by Andy. Xen and the entire market of virtualization software is "suffering" from exceptionally rapid growth. This stuff isn't mature yet, and there's lots of work to be done. Most effort is currently being spent on optimizing the software and adding features for the most common implementation situations. Therefore VMware's management tools lean toward being heavily Windows-centric, since its largest installed base is in corporate environments where Windows-based management tools are the norm. Xen is best tested with Linux for both host and guest... the fact that it's open source lets others like Solaris and BSD get in on the fun, but it's up to their developers to keep up with Xen. As time goes on and the feature sets of all these systems stabilize, then the APIs and documentation will too. Subsequently more development effort will be able to focus on what are currently "edge cases," and virtualization will move toward being an expected feature of every OS and at some point probably fade into the background as something that "just works." -- Joshua Penix http://www.binarytribe.com Binary Tribe Linux Integration Services & Network Consulting -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
