>-----Original Message----- >From: Ross Walker [mailto:rswwal...@gmail.com] >Sent: Friday, April 23, 2010 7:08 AM >> >> We are currently porting over our existing Learning Lab Infrastructure >> platform from MS Virtual Server to VBox + ZFS. When students >> connect into >> their lab environment it dynamically creates their VMs and load >> balances >> them across physical servers. > >You can also check out OpenSolaris' Xen implementation, which if you >use Linux VMs will allow PV VMs as well as hardware assisted full >virtualized Windows VMs. There are public domain Windows Xen drivers >out there. > >The advantage of using Xen is it's VM live migration and XMLRPC >management API. As it runs as a bare metal hypervisor it also allows >fine granularity of CPU schedules, between guests and the host VM, but >unfortunately it's remote display technology leaves something to be >desired. For Windows VMs I use the built-in remote desktop, and for >Linux VMs I use XDM and use something like 'thinstation' on the client >side. > >-Ross
Hi Ross. We decided to use a hosted hypervisor like VirtualBox because our customers use a variety of different platforms and they don't run high end workloads. We want a lot of flexibility on configuration and OS support (both host and guest). Remote control is a challenge. In our scenario students are going to spin up exact copies of a lab environment and we need to isolate their machines in separate networks so you can't directly connect to the VMs. We don't know what Guest OS they are going to run so we can't rely on the guest OS remote control tools. We want students to be able to have "console" access and they need to be able to share it out with an instructor. We want students to be able to connect from any type of device. We don't want to rely on other connection broker software to coordinate access. VirtualBox is great because it provides console level access via RDP. RDP performs well enough and is pretty much on everything. This is probably getting a bit off topic now :) Geoff _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
