Re: [tlug] Xen advice, please: Wine is not Virtualization

[Ragga Muffin <r_muffin@example.com>]

Hello folks,

I've played quite a bit with XEN lately and will happily share my experiences
at the next tech meeting and maybe do a presentation at the first opportunity.

 On Wednesday, January 10, 2007, at 09:52AM, <burlingk@example.com> wrote:
>
>Xen, VMware, are virtual machines.  They emulate everything from the
>ground up.  They do something totally different from WINE.  Basically
>"WINE Is Not an Emulator", a virtual machine is. ^_^

To be pedantic, XEN is not really an emulator, it is a hypervisor.
On conventional intel (and AMD) processors XEN provides a 
software layer that manages the hardware using linux as a
"helper". In a sense, it is a new architecture for linux but runs on
intel and AMD cpus. So, XEN is like replacing your linux kernel
with the combination of XEN hypervisor + linux-kernel-xen.

While XEN in itself is quite fascinating, to us linuxers it is probably more
interesting to know what you can do with XEN. Namely, you can
run multiple instances of linux on one physical machine. These instances
are, for all practical purposes,  totally separated from each other, much like
separate physical machines.

As for production readyness, I would say that if you are able to install and
run your instances in the configuration you want, it will not crash easily.
We are running a few machines with different configurations and have not
had any xen related or stability problems. 
Also, installing XEN is not hte challenge. The challenge is to understand
the level of resources your instances need and then
 plan your installation in a manner that allows configuration flexibility and/or scaling.

If there is interest, perhaps I will start to make some pages on the
TLUG wiki about this stuff.

HTH, cheers ;-)
--
Henri