"Linux & Xen promises to be the real VMWare killer"
Then, the awesomeness of Xen & Linux is touted:
Linux is a superior platform for supporting 64-bit processors, multi-processors, and blade/cluster architectures, plus you don't get trapped in licensing hell, so it's a natural as a host system for all sorts of virtualization scenarios. You get horsepower, stability and flexibility. Linux + Xen promises to be the real VMWare killer, for those who require "killer" scenarios. (Us peaceniks will settle for "something that works faster and more better. Oh yeah, and doesn't have a big price tag.")
But then the truth comes out:
Xen is just a baby, though a fast-growing baby, so it's still pretty limited. See the OS compatibility page for current status. Xen supports up to 4GB RAM, and currently supports only IA32, so it won't run on Itanium. It will run on any AMD64, since these have native support for IA32. Xen supports SMP on the host system, but not the guest OSes.
Hold on to your seats... there's more. I love this part especially:
I really wanted to make this a nice Xen howto, all about installing it to a hard drive and installing guest operating systems, but I couldn't get the blimey thing to work. Installing Xen is easy- getting the guest OS to work on my test Ubuntu system just didn't work. Either I'm dim, or it's difficult. I vote for difficult. And, the steps are different for every Linux distribution. So instead here a list of howtos for different distros:
Fedora Xen Quickstart
A moment of Xen: Virtualize Linux to test your apps (for Fedora)
Custom Xen Kernels on Debian
Setting up a XEN host with Debian
The Perfect Xen Setup For Debian And Ubuntu
Fedora 4 and SuSE 9.3 both come with Xen, it's in Debian Unstable, and Red Hat EL5 will have it.
If it is so awesome, why all the trouble? Just install it and get busy... Oh... like most other open source stuff, nothing is ever really FINISHED.
The last two paragraphs are good reading... you'll have to click over there to see for yourself. Mostly it says you should bother with Xen because some day it is going to grow up... and that the evil-companies-that-make-money are at fault for virtualization not taking off sooner.
Posted By: Jim on Thursday, February 02, 2006
PermaLink | 2 comments | Click to Comment
Bookmark at: 
2 Comments:
Cmon you aren't serious. Start thinking about OpenSource projects. What are you thinking about? Firefox? Thunderbird? OpenOffice? OpenSSH? XviD codec?
Out there there's a plenty of finished, fully functional, production ready apps and even OSes [Linux and the BSD family].
What you can say is that xen is still in an early development phase, that's right, but don't shoot blindly if someone said something wrong. I've seen xen machine working, without problem. So it's not so far the moment when there'll be compairson between vmware and xen
By
Anonymous, at February 02, 2006 6:24 PM
Point taken... I use OpenOffice and the XviD codec on a regular basis. I guess I just get a little tired of the attitude in that article that before Xen is even done, it is already certanly a VMWare killer... and that it is somehow big-companies' fault that virtualization is slow to take off. I think that it is actually VMWare who is responsible for this big push for virtualization. And they're a big company... Or maybe it was the argument I got into yesterday with a guy that was anti-establishment in every way, shape and form... that is what this article reminded me of for some reason.
By
Jim, at February 02, 2006 7:52 PM
Post a Comment
<< Home