xen

I threw together a quick screencast for Dann from the Linux Link Tech Show explaining the history of and differences between Xen and KVM. Feedback is encouraged because I'm sure I have some mistakes in there.

xen-and-kvm-history.webm (36.2 MB)

RH SlideVirtualization has been a buzz word for a few years now. Some people think it has been over-hyped but I'm not one of those people. The big competing products seem to be: VMware, Xen, KVM, VirtualBox, Parallels (including OpenVZ), and Hyper-V.

Is there too much choice out there? Choice isn't bad, is it? Will there eventually be a market shake up with a thinning of product candidates as a result? Will someone try to proclaim that they are the virtualization "standard"? I don't really know. I certainly like competition and don't think having a number of competing products is bad. There are both proprietary products and FOSS products. As you can guess, I lean towards the later if at all possible.

Update: Full article now includes two embedded flash videos from Red Hat.

I sent this to the centos-virt mailing list today... and thought I'd share it here as well.

Greetings,

I'm a big OpenVZ fanboy. I've sent a few emails on this list that proves that... and I'm sure I've annoyed some people... but be that as it may... I would like to draw everyone on this list's attention to Proxmox VE. What is Proxmox VE?

Slides PDFI'm all done with making the slides for my presentation on OS Virtualization vs. Hardware Virtualization for the Linuxfest Northwest 2008 conference.

Check out photos in the photo gallery. Thanks goes to Warren for letting me borrow his camera. All photos are licensed under a Creative Commons license so do with them what you will.

Update: Ok, here's the video of my presentation.

The Linuxfest Northwest 2008 show is quickly approaching - April 26 & 27 in Bellingham, Washington. It happens to be the closest Linux show to Montana that I'm aware of. Last year Warren, Donnie, Ken and I went. It was a blast. Check out my report from last year if you missed it.

Anyhoo... several of us are going and I've even signed up for a presentation entitled OS Virtualization vs. Hardware Virtualization. I haven't put together the presentation yet but I have done about a half dozen related presentations over the last two years. I think with this one though, I'm going to concentrate less on specific products and more on how OS Virtualization has been making its way into the mainline Linux kernel (called CGroups or control groups).

If anyone is interested in attending the conference, please let me know ASAP. We currently have one vehicle going and one room... but we could easily expand that if need be.

Warren and I have attended three different Linux conferences in the past: Linux World Conference and Expo (once last year), Colorado Linux User Expo (twice back in the 90s - now defunct), and the Linuxfest Northwest (last year). Of the three LFNW, is the only completely free one and as such it has the strongest community feel to it. The schedule has been finalized... so check it out to see just how many things interest you... and don't forget about the exhibits either. There is a LOT there!

Xen in actionAccording to the XenSource About page, "XenSource plays the dual role of leading the open source Xen(tm) community, while simultaneously selling value-added enterprise solutions based on Xen technology." The first part of that leads to various Linux distro makers integrating Xen into their distributions (like SUSE, Red Hat/clones, and Fedora). For the second part of that, XenSource currently offers a product line which includes XenExpress, XenServer and XenEnterprise. Of the three offerings, XenExpress is designed to be the entry level product and is free. I recently downloaded XenExpress and gave it a try.

During the course of this article I will describe the basic design of XenExpress, its installation, installation and use of the Administrator Console client application, creation, monitoring and management of Xen virtual machines... and then I'll try to contrast how XenSource's product line stacks up to Xen as offered by Red Hat and clones. Feel free to jump directly to the XenExpress photo gallery if desired.

Virtual Machine ManagerI got a bit farther with Xen this time. I did another CentOS 5 Beta install and made sure to add the Virtualization package set. It's not like I needed to do another install but I've been doing a few installs just to test out differences with the various package sets.

I originally tried out Xen about a year and a half ago on a Fedora Core 4 host on rather underpowered hardware and a lot has changed since then.