Xen is most certainly an alternative to vmware.... depending on how you use
vmware. At Ticketmaster, we do a lot of development on devel "clusters" made
up of a bunch of vmware esx servers running Linux as the client OS. This
allows us to have only a few beefy boxes but (roughly) as many virtual
systems as we need. Xen could work very well in this role.
Now Xen does have some drawbacks compared to vmware. Some of them are:
o Doesn't play well with NPTL/TLS without a performance hit. This may require
modifying the host and client glibc... not always a pleasant task
o No capability for snapshots
o Missing most if not all of the "enterprise" management features of the
vmware server products
o Can't run Windows
o Installing a Linux OS that doesn't directly support Xen can be a pain
The big advantages, of course, are that it's very fast, doesn't use as many
resources as vmware, and it's free.
I base all this mostly on articles I've read on Xen as I've been following it
relatively closely for awhile. I do have a Xen installation with SuSE/SuSE
(*very* easy to install) but haven't done more than just play around with it.
On Wednesday 07 December 2005 19:26, Dan Lund wrote:
> I honestly wouldn't consider it an alternative to vmware. Not yet, at
> least. It's relatively complex, IMHO.
>
> I use User-mode Linux for Linux, and VMWare for Windows. I have used
> Qemu for Windows though.
>
> On 12/7/05, Michael March <mmarch@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > * Xen 3.0 snapshot for i386
> >
> > Is anyone using Xen out there?
> >
> > I use VMWARE a lot so I was wondering if Xen is ready to start looking
> > at compared to VMWARE.
>
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