[Discuss] choice of hypervisor (was gracefully shutdown guests)

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

And VMware predates all of them (1998). But it does not matter. What 
matters is how useful it is. I use Virtualbox and KVM at home because 
both work well with Linux. I use VirtualBox at work because that is the 
only one we are permitted to have on our workstation. Shirley's point, 
"It's good to have a choice" is very appopriate. The biggest advantage 
of VirtualBox is that it is very cross platform, in that it can run on 
Macs, Linux, Windows and commercial Unix.

On 06/05/2013 01:00 PM, Shirley M?rquez D?lcey wrote:
> You're right, it's not dead after all. Google, Amazon, and other big users
> picked up the development slack, and Citrix (which bought Xensource, the
> original backer of Xen) opened up the project to make it possible. The
> slideshow on xenproject.org (
> http://www.xenproject.org/component/allvideoshare/video/latest/how-to-almost-kill-a-successful-project-and-then-bring-it-back-to-life-lessons-learned-from-the-xen-project.html)
> tells a bit of the story.
>
> A bare metal hypervisor like Xen makes sense in some use cases, and a
> userspace-oriented one like KVM makes sense in others. It's good to have a
> choice.
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Matthew Gillen wrote:
>>> The history is a little more convoluted.  Redhat got on board with Xen
>>> because at the time it was the more advanced solution.  With RH's
>> Minor nit: at the time it was the ONLY solution. Xen predates KVM by
>> almost 10 years.
>>
>>
>>> Linus much preferred the QEMU/KVM approach, and basically said he'd
>>> never bring Xen into the mainline.  Since RH has a policy (a wise one
>> I don't. KVM isn't a bare metal hypervisor like Xen. Every KVM guest is
>> a process running on the Linux host. That's fine as a substitute for
>> VMware Workstation but it's not so good for enterprise class virtual
>> server racks. It's also not so good for workstation virtualization since
>> you can only run KVM guests on Linux hosts thus negating the easy
>> portability that makes workstation virtualization so useful.
>>
>>
>>> So basically at this point everyone has thrown their lot in with
>>> QEMU/KVM and Xen is pretty much abandoned except for some researchers.
>> Xen abandoned? Only used by researchers? Perhaps you've never heard of
>> Amazon EC2 or Rackspace or Linode. They're only some of the largest VPS
>> platforms in the world and they all run on Xen.
>


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id:3BC1EB90
PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66  C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90