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Re: OT: Xen

  • From: Eric Frazier
  • Date: Mon Apr 03 11:49:54 2006
  • Accreditor: Habeas

Hi,

Speaking of commercial support, I have been looking really closely at using Solaris 10 which includes Zones.
I am not so much concerned about the OS games, but very much concerned about the HW % utilization issue that this could help solve. From what I have found with Solaris Zones it is VERY easy to setup and configure. The question that I got flamed on a while back for being off topic, how do you get two different DHCP addresses from difference sources on the same interface, can be solved by using Zones for example.

But there has been so much press lately about Xen. And from what I read in Linux mag recently there is HW support that totally changes how efficient Xen can be. So one thing I am wondering, with Zones you can setup a new instance that is a copy of another pretty much instantly. Does Xen offer the same thing? Or do you still have to go through an install process for example? I am esp wondering about this with something like XP..

Thanks,

Eric



At 07:00 AM 4/3/2006, Todd Vierling wrote:

On Mon, 3 Apr 2006, Chris Adams wrote:

> > Xen is not, however, backed with
> > extensive commercial support (XenSource is still evolving at the moment),
>
> Red Hat has announced that the next rev of their commercial OS offering,
> RHEL 5, will include Xen as a major component.

The point is that decent commercial support is evolving and not quite Here
Right Now.

> > lacks easy integration into popular UI/control-panel products, and requires
> > special kernels for the contained OS's (not such a big deal in practice).
>
> With the right CPUs (late model Intel only at the moment), you can run
> an OS unmodified with a little higher overhead.

It's still some overhead because it's emulating hardware devices, but thanks
to VX, it's not as bad as the classical virtualization trap hacks. Once AMD
releases their counterpart version of the virtualization extensions en
masse, this will probably get more steam from providers.

If a Xen-instrumented kernel is available for the desired OS, that would
still be preferable, of course.

--
-- Todd Vierling <[email protected]> <[email protected]> <[email protected]>