informationweek.com— IBM support is a plus for Novell, which is getting Linux out the door with Xen ahead of its competitor, Red Hat. Both have announced support for Xen on their future Linux distributions.
Jul 15, 2006View in Crawl 4
I've been told out of VMWare, Xen and Parallels for Linux, VMWare is the best bet. I've tried Parallels for linux and it was lacking quite a bit. Haven't heard much about Xen.
Here's what it's for. These days IT prefers not to run servers that have multiple services on them. Apparently it makes it harder to administer, they always have to worry about upgrading one service breaking another, etc. So the new model is one service per server. However, that is not efficient as services are bursty so a server is often not being used.This is where virtualization comes in. They now have one service per server, but it's a virtual server. Then they run multiple virtual servers on one physical box, using Xen or some other virtualization technology. The result is that the box is back to running multiple services like in the old days, but now each service is in its own personal operating system and there are much stronger barriers between them. So the services can be managed more easily without worrying about one breaking another.Of course, you'd think you could achieve the same effect just by running a decent OS, without having to jump through all these hoops. After all, that's what OS's are for, to provide context separation and make each process unaware of other processes running on the machine. But apparently that doesn't work so well, so we have this new roundabout solution. I can't help thinking that this is temporary and that eventually OS's will be good enough that this won't be necessary.
It's currently possible to run Windows as a guest operating system unmodified, using hardware virtualization provided by Intel's Vanderpool technology (only available in recent processors) or the upcoming AMD Pacifica. It is, however, impossible to use Windows (or indeed any fully-virtualised OS) as the "Domain 0" OS, and it is illegal to acquire a paravirtualised copy of Windows (a port of Windows XP to the Xen hypervisor did exist during early stages of development, but it was not possible for the developers to release the source code to these changes due to the license terms of the Windows XP source code).
flair1Jul 15, 2006
of course ibm supports it.. this will convince customers to buy bigger and bigger servers
visceralJul 15, 2006
I've been told out of VMWare, Xen and Parallels for Linux, VMWare is the best bet. I've tried Parallels for linux and it was lacking quite a bit. Haven't heard much about Xen.
siliconentityJul 16, 2006
Here's what it's for. These days IT prefers not to run servers that have multiple services on them. Apparently it makes it harder to administer, they always have to worry about upgrading one service breaking another, etc. So the new model is one service per server. However, that is not efficient as services are bursty so a server is often not being used.This is where virtualization comes in. They now have one service per server, but it's a virtual server. Then they run multiple virtual servers on one physical box, using Xen or some other virtualization technology. The result is that the box is back to running multiple services like in the old days, but now each service is in its own personal operating system and there are much stronger barriers between them. So the services can be managed more easily without worrying about one breaking another.Of course, you'd think you could achieve the same effect just by running a decent OS, without having to jump through all these hoops. After all, that's what OS's are for, to provide context separation and make each process unaware of other processes running on the machine. But apparently that doesn't work so well, so we have this new roundabout solution. I can't help thinking that this is temporary and that eventually OS's will be good enough that this won't be necessary.
ayamJul 16, 2006
It's currently possible to run Windows as a guest operating system unmodified, using hardware virtualization provided by Intel's Vanderpool technology (only available in recent processors) or the upcoming AMD Pacifica. It is, however, impossible to use Windows (or indeed any fully-virtualised OS) as the "Domain 0" OS, and it is illegal to acquire a paravirtualised copy of Windows (a port of Windows XP to the Xen hypervisor did exist during early stages of development, but it was not possible for the developers to release the source code to these changes due to the license terms of the Windows XP source code).