> I currently have 32 Windows XP machines virtualized on a CentOS machine > under Xen. They're used for testing websites under IE (and are > accessed > via RDP). Unfortunately, I have been having horrible performance > issues > with Windows XP under Xen. I've emailed the centos-virt list to see if > anyone has ideas about that. What I'm hoping to find out from people > on > this list is other suggestions on what to use to virtualize XP under > Linux or if Xen is what most people are using. Secondly, I'm curious > what people use for testing sites under Internet Explorer (my devs all > use Macs, and I don't want to have them virtualize on their machines). > Plus, they need to be able to test under IE6 and IE7/8.
I find that Xen is great for virtualization of linux inside of linux ... And for nothing else. In fact, whenever I have a non-linux guest inside of Xen, I find Xen is unstable. I have a server with windows & linux guests inside of xen on RHEL5 host ... and about once per month, xen will lose its mind, and the memory of one machine becomes the memory of another. Solution is to reboot all the guests and host. And yes, performance is terrible, except for linux in linux. For either linux or mac hosts ... Sun Virtualbox is a pretty good choice. It has some bugs here and there ... but it does in fact have "guest extensions" or whatever they call it ... So the guest stability and performance is very good. If you only use your virtual machine casually, you can't beat the price of virtualbox. But if you use it all day every day, such as I do ... I run windows inside of mac every day, and I also run windows inside of ubuntu every day ... Then I find virtualbox is just simply too buggy and kloogy. On the mac, either parallels or vmware fusion is the professional way to go. In fusion, you must remember to install VMWare Tools, and in parallels, you must remember to install Parallels Extensions. If you do this, performance is near 100%. I personally prefer fusion for performance and reliability reasons, but parallels is slightly more featureful. Both are good choices, with neither having a large edge over the other in any way. On linux, VMWare Workstation is the professional way to go. Beware versions though. Check the vmware compatibility guide. I find VMWare Workstation is typically only compatible with hosts a rev behind ... For example ... Workstation works fine on ubuntu 904, but not 910. But by the time 1004 comes out, I think 910 will be supported. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
