Timothy Kennedy wrote: > > > James Cornell wrote: >> Granted you have enough memory for a full instance, which shouldn't be >> less than 1GB per virtual machine if you're doing development in it. >> Vista would take more, and it's obvious the drivers are very weak in >> functionality. I was saying specifically to OpenSolaris, Xen is more >> lacking all around, but is improving. You have to run cutting edge >> barely supported software to just run Windows, slowly. It's pointless >> at the moment. AMD 1218 and higher support virtualization also, I just >> got an Ultra-20 large config, and was going to play around with vVM and >> FreeBSD. As for Windows, I've always viewed the VMware or native way as >> best, Xen just doesn't cut it, nor will it for a long while. This stems >> from performance issues and closed-source aspect of Windows itself, >> which stagnates the ability to tune performance for non-tested >> platforms. It's always going to be slower with virtual machines that >> are not para-virtualized, and VMware still beats Xen in that area, but >> it's locked down to platforms I'd rather not use as a host, which is why >> I deal with the painful operation of Xen. It's good news that this only >> applies to Windows, as NetBSD and FreeBSD have had Xen support for a >> while. NetBSD since release 3.0, and FreeBSD sometime after 6.2's >> release in -CURRENT. I have no interest in Linux, it's one of those >> things that I hate dealing with. It brings ignorance to the masses and >> stagnates development of itself by political impotence. > > Thanks, James. Very informative post. I've always liked the BSD's in > terms of performance on the network. I don't mind linux. > > I am going to play with Xen, though and xVM/HVM and see what it's like. > Do you have any experience with VM live migration in Xen? > > -Tim > Not with regards to migration to OpenSolaris' xVM. I have some experience, through trial and error and testing of a few different versions of Xen implementations on FreeBSD and Linux of migration, but my method is probably not the cleanest way, it stems from using basic utilities such as netcat and tar and a simple kernel rebuild and changes to fstab, etc. I mainly migrate using this method because it's how I successfully migrate VMware machines without using commercial methods. (Which aren't available on Linux or FreeBSD, just Windows) OpenSolaris' xVM won't be integrated and fully supported again until ON 75 is released, which is internal. I will not fall back on the B66 consolidation, as I am using an Ultra-20 with Opteron 1218, and would lose functionality. I'm using 70b currently, but would be willing to test out 75's build if a Sun engineer could get me a copy of the internal build granted it's in somewhat working order. I have an idea for a GUI application that migrates Xen virtual machines, but this is not for the faint of heart, as it requires months of development and multiple team members to accomplish, in addition to intimate understanding of dependencies and implementation details per-platform for Xen itself. But from an end-user perspective, using manual migration means, I wouldn't mind trying to get it working, as I don't have experience with OpenSolaris xVM at all due to the lag between releases mainly.
James
