Xen 3

[Dan Lund]

Thus, as I said, it's not an alternative to VMWare :)
Sure, it's the same idea, in a limited scope and with far too many
eccentricities to be seriously considered a viable alternative.
If going linux-only, I'd consider Usermode Linux to be more of an
alternative to VMWare.  I have a track record with that, and I know it
works without my altering anything other than the kernel.
However, most times when the name VMWare comes up, it means cross-os
usage.  With that, there aren't many other options other than Qemu,
Bochs, and Plex86.

--Dan

On 12/8/05, Kurt Granroth <plug-discuss at granroth.org> wrote:
> 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.
>