Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Beginning adventures with Xen

I've been a fan of virtualiztion since VMware gave away VMware Server for free. I've upgraded the host OS on my desktop twice and I have been able to remain productive as all my work resides on a separate disk and in virtual machines.

However, since VMware Server 2.0 was released, I've been actively looking for alternatives. Coincidentally, our hosting provider will be implementing Xen soon for LAMP deployments and I thought this to be the perfect excuse to at least install and try it out.

Well, so far I'm stuck because I can't boot to X windows on the Xen Kernel because I'm using nvidia drivers. I'm sure there is a solution already somewhere but I'm going to stop for now and leave it as something to look forward to solving over the coming weekend ;-)

3 comments:

  1. I am currently using kvm with virt-manager, its close enough to basic vmware. I also like kvm, as now no need to have custom kernel. Wireless, suspend/resume works. Only problem that annoys me is that after resuming the host machine, I need to forward the clock of the guest machines.

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  2. VirtualBox is the best bet for something that resembles the free VMWare Server of old. I have had great success with it. It provides the desktop UI you'd want for a developer's workstation. For servers I think Xen is the way to go.

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  3. Thanks for leaving your comments :-)

    @tdxdave

    The last time I tried virtual box I got frustrated setting up bridged networking. Patrick tells me its much easier in the new release so I'll probably give it a second look.

    @Jun

    Thanks for letting me know about kvm. I've heard of it but haven't had the chance to try it out. Now that I know you're using it, I'm going to give it a try.

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