Virtualization

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Comment by Attila Seress on October 15, 2009 at 12:29pm

You could probably virtualiza another windows machine in there...

Comment by omgparticle on October 15, 2009 at 9:46am

I used Xen on CentOS for a bit and it was pretty straight forward. Currently I am trying out kvm (I liked the ease of what I read on it's live migration to other servers that run different processors-(*but have not tried that yet), also liked it being included in kernel, and since redhat took it over I figured I should look into it- it's a bit new/fresh and mainly command line tools that I've seen so far (also shares virt-manager). Also have an aix side of the house so I hope to experiment with the powervm when I can.

Downloaded that Hyper V yesterday but it gave an error/failed saying something about the vbscript.dll file after the installation seemed done and it was trying to kick off the config program. I also once downloaded the vmware hypervisor but had issues with it to after installation. Maybe I'll get around to trying those both again one day when I have the time and another server.

Comment by Mark Gilbert on October 14, 2009 at 10:51pm

Brian. I couldn't agree more!

Comment by Brian Russo on October 14, 2009 at 9:56pm

Microsoft GPL'd the drivers necessary to get Linux working with Hyper-V and SuSE/RedHat are supported, however there have been some "personal problems" in terms of having it stay in the kernel, haven't really been following it."Most" enterprises are typically using SuSE or RedHat anyway, so I wouldn't expect to see a laundry list of supported distros anyway.

Xen seems Okay, I briefly tried it but the management tools were klunky and I didn't have much luck getting them to work. That's not a big deal if you're accepting the argument that it's "free" but when you're deploying something that will be maintained by other people it's a big factor. I think a lot of people really underestimate the importance of good management tools, especially as the number of sockets you have increases. With one or two hypervisor boxes it's not a big deal; but as you grow a lack of management software can make virtualisation worse than "regular" servers because the number of servers you have tends to explode.

Comment by Mark Gilbert on October 14, 2009 at 7:47pm

Oracle VM, Sun VM, Citrix Xen and even Hyper V to a point are all based on the Xen open source Hyper Visor. Hence my contention that the hyper visor will become a commodity. The true battle ground are the features. Most corporate customers will want software support, true H/A (fault tolerance), high end management features, and DR/COOP capabilities. If you just running the hyper visor on your home pc, open source Xen is great.

Comment by 808blogger on October 14, 2009 at 4:53pm

Xen to virtualize windows it's free stable and mature

Comment by Attila Seress on October 14, 2009 at 2:29pm

Thanks Mark for your dedication!

Honestly, I'm more of a Microsoft guy myself but I've become more excited by linux since they've matured the gui and improved the lamp architecture (mostly mysql). Hyper V (virtualization) is the last frontier MS hasn't really dominated so I'm just wondering where this is all going...

Comment by Mark Gilbert on October 14, 2009 at 2:20pm

I will punt that question to my Microsoft Guru Kelly. I just invited him to join the Hui and I will have him bring his much more in depth knowledge to this thread and give you an answer.

Comment by Attila Seress on October 14, 2009 at 1:24pm

Well, having dealt with terminal server in the past, nt 3.51 and 4.0 terminal server edition was fine until they brought out the terminal server licensing server - not sure if it was for server 2000 but it was certainly for 2003 server. It's like they got you hooked while they figured out their bugs and then did heavy licensing enforcement one the product matured.

Does hyper v support applying patches to a single image of the OS that multiple thin clients can connect to (like citrix)?

From what I remember, hyper v only supported suse enterprise linux. Would you happen to know if it's been expanded to any other distro?

Comment by Mark Gilbert on October 14, 2009 at 12:22pm

I wish there was an easy answer to that. Hyper V comes free on all MS server licenses. That being said, if you want to be in "technical compliance" with the terms and conditions of the MS server license, you are only allowed to move one VM or physical machine every 90 days. You have to have the Data Center license in order run multiple vm's on one single machine. The versions are identical, it is just about licensing. The same is true of VMware btw. Most people are running VMware on standard MS server licenses. That "technically" is illegal and in violation of the MS server license agreement. Once again, you need Data Center to "legally" run windows on vmware. Now, is MS going to enforce that certain clause? Your guess is as good as mine.

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