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  Asked: Jul 24 2008   5:54 PM GMT
  Asked by: Chunter

Virtualization Product Choices


Linux Distributions, Data Center management, Virtualization technologies, CentOS, AMD, Xen, Windows XP, VirtualBox

I will be setting up my new system in a couple of weeks. I'll be running CentOS 5 on a quad core AMD Opteron. I'm going to run Windows XP as a guest OS, and possibly 1 or more Linux distros. Does anyone have any suggestions? I am currently considering Xen or Virtualbox, leaning towards Xen.

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Last Answered: Jul 28 2008  3:43 PM GMT  by Schmidtw




From my experience, XEN has been the best. I have only done very limited virtualization, but XEN has handled all virtualization we have done thusfar. This includes XP, Vista, and a few Linux Distros as well.
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Nopius  |   Aug 3 2008  11:37PM GMT

I recommend you to try all available choices before making decision.

Xen is a CPU virtualization and is the most ‘lightweight’. Currently there are 2 major Xen implementations:
- open source (included in some Linux distributions)
- commercial XenDesktop Express (with free version available for up to 2xCPU sockets, 4G RAM, 4x guest OSes): <a href="http://citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=163057" rel="nofollow">http://citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=163057</a>

Commercial version should be more Windows-guest friendly. It has unified ‘Virtualization Management Console’ and most easy to use.

I have no experience with Xen and Windows guest (because my CPU doesn’t have virtualization features). I used open source Xen on Linux with Linux guest - it was very stable.

VirtualBox is a hardware virtualization and quite heavy. I’m using it now for running all my guest OSes, sometimes it’s quite slow, but faster than vmware. I have no problems with it on Windows guest.
There are also 2 VirtualBox implementations: open source edition (VirtualBox OSE) and commercial (just called VirtualBox, it’s also free but only in binaries): <a href="http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions" rel="nofollow">http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions</a>
Making NIC work on guest at the same network segment as host is a little tricky, but possible. On commercial version there are tools for network configuration, that are absent on OSE, so I recommend you commercial.

 

Gilly400  |   Aug 7 2008  10:13AM GMT

Hi,

Are there many other alternatives worth looking at?

Regards,

Martin Gilbert.