[lug] xen versus vmware

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Mon, 3 Dec 2007 14:34:22 -0800 (PST)
horlenkarl at yahoo.com (karl horlen) wrote:

> Does anybody have a preference either way?  
> 
> Ad|Disadvantages of either or?

Personally, my answer is: Neither. ;) 

I like kvm ( http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki ). 

It seems to be pretty fast and stable and they are working on getting
it caught up on all the xen/vmware features. Downside is that you must
have a newer cpu that can do hardware virt. 

Xen and Vmware both have problems that make me never want to use either
of them if I can avoid it. ;) 

> I believe with vmware, one can actually use a tool to
> create a virtual machine of an existing windows
> installation which sounds like a time saver.
> 
> I'm curious if that same migration functionality
> exists for an existing linux install or not with
> either xen or vmware?  
> 
> For instance.  Could I install a xen kernel, change
> grub, but to the xen kernel, then create a virtual
> machine out of the original existing linux kernel /
> filesystem I previously was booting into?

I don't know off hand of any setup to do that, but I don't see why it
wouldn't be possible with some creative dd usage to get things in the
right place. 

Several other things to look at: 

- libvirt is what I use here on my F8 laptop to
manage virtuals. http://libvirt.org/
It's an abstraction layer over xen/kvm/qemu. It's very nice IMHO. 
There's a nice management gui, new virtual setup wizard thing, and a
very very full featured command line client.

- http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/ has some good info on the various tech
out there and how it works. Nice basic background.

kevin
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