Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > > 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. >
I agree that Linux inside Linux with Xen is good. I definitely need a solution to virtualize Windows on a server rather than having the devs virtualize on their local machines. I regularly use Virtualbox locally and like it and have thought about setting up a server with a group of headless VMs under it, but I am unsure of how Virtualbox performs in that setup. Definitely looking for a server rather than workstation solution so perhaps VMWare Server may be the way to go. Thanks for your thoughts. Ryan _______________________________________________ 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/
