Xen, KVM

[jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org (Jarod Wilson)]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 3:05 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro-blu-5a1Jt6qxUNc at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Jarod Wilson wrote:
>> Derek Atkins wrote:
>>> * To what granularity can one set up remote access to different VB VMs?
>>
>> Don't think so. For server use like this, VMware is definitely still superior.
>>
>>> * Can one remotely manage a VirtualBox server?
>>
>> Sort of. But its really more geared towards desktop use, more similar
>> to vmware workstation than vmware server.
>
> Isn't Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC)[1] (built on Eucalyptus, which is
> built on Xen, and is Amazon EC2 compatible) more along the lines of what
> Derek wants, or is that overkill?

I think Derek would have to answer that...

>> I actually use kvm just about everywhere now...
>
> I read that KVM is internally far cleaner than Xen (I think you've
> mentioned that here several times),

Yeah, I most likely have. Xen is a horrendous beast.

> but have the support tools caught
> up, such that you can build an "enterprise" style cluster with KVM?

For the most part, yes. And in some ways, it has surpassed xen. Note
that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 public beta was just released...
Note the complete lack of any Xen kernel... There's a very good reason
Red Hat bough Qumranet, and that entire group (and then some) have
been BUSY. :)

> Then there's the issue of being able to migrate the VM to a third party,
> like Amazon. For now, that seems to lock you in to Xen.

You can move a fully-virt guest back and forth between Xen and KVM
rather easily. Its only para-virt xen guests that require some
trickeration. However, we *can* run xen paravirt guests on top of a
kvm hypervisor now too. See http://kraxel.fedorapeople.org/xenner/ for
more details.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org