Virtualization recommendation

[brads at redhat.com (Brad Smith)]

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> I'm not sure about the capabilities of either xen or vmware with regard
> to demanding graphics or audio support.  But that might be a consideration.

My understanding is that, at least in FC5 it is expected that you access the graphical interface via
vnc. In other words, there's no support for actually running an X display within the VM. I'm not
100% certain about that, though.

Having played with both VMWare (which is, indeed, now available in a free beer version) and Xen, I
would say that if you want to run (certain distributions of) Linux under Linux for the purpose of
having low-overhead virtual servers, then Xen is a good option. If you want full virtualization of
the guest operating system running as an application then you're better off with vmware. I actually
have both installed on my laptop and use them both for different purposes. The reason I'd go with
Xen on a server is that, unlike the free version of vmware (as far as I can tell), with Xen I can
just run "xm create vhostname" and it will start that vhost running in the background. I can connect
to it with "xm console vhostname" or vnc when I want to interact with it, but otherwise it's just an
alter-ego running unattached to any particular login session.

- --Brad


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