Virtualization Product Choices

Chunter

110 pts.

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AMD

CentOS

Data Center management

Linux Distributions

Microsoft Windows XP

VirtualBox

Virtualization technologies

Xen

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.

Asked: July 24, 2008 5:54 PM Last updated: November 23, 2008 12:47 PM

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Last updated: July 28, 2008 3:43 PM GMT

Schmidtw11,330 pts.
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- Schmidtw11,330 pts.

Thanks. We'll let you know when a new response is added.

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.

Discuss This Question: 3 Replies

Nopius Aug 3, 2008 11:37 PM 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): http://citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=163057 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): http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions 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.

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Gilly400 Aug 7, 2008 10:13 AM GMT

Hi, Are there many other alternatives worth looking at? Regards, Martin Gilbert.

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Virtualaleph Nov 23, 2008 12:47 AM GMT

let's try ESXi --> it's free and very complete: no other product can compete with vmware (IMO). Manlio My virtualization Blog

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