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Xen and the art of virtualisation

post #1 of 7
10/3/03 at 6:26am
Thread Starter 
For those of you interested in having full virtual computers running around inside your Sagers:
Xen and the art of virtualisation
Whilst it is not yet production quality nor can you run XP out of the box on it, its performance characteristics make it worthy of consideration.
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post #2 of 7
10/6/03 at 3:09pm
Whats wrong with VMWare?!
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post #3 of 7
10/6/03 at 9:26pm
Thread Starter 
vmware takes a 50% performance hit when you are doing I/O. If you read thru the white paper on Xen they have some comparative benchmarks. One of my reasons for getting the 3.2 8890 was to offset this effect as much as possible when running linux under vmware.

The big difference between Xen and vmware is that Xen is a true virtualisation, there is no "host OS". Each OS is a "guest" if you like. If you have ever played around with IBM's MVS you will get the idea. It provides a set of virtual computers into which you then load your real OS.

vmware is an emulator of sorts rather than a true virtualisation. It runs as an application under the host OS then provides an emulated computer. Hence why vmware can't play games on the ATI hardware - vmware drivers are emulated.

Xen on the other hand could theoretically allow this as each system has a complete (within reason) system. Because of this different approach you don't take the performance hit and direct access to graphics cards would be possible (again in theory).

As they point out it is only a research project (oh well) and does require mods to the OS (which guest OS in vmware dont) to get them to work with Xen. It is the way to go. Maybe Microsoft will provide a Xenized version of XP for general consumption - who knows.
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post #4 of 7
10/6/03 at 9:36pm

yeah

vmware DEVOURS resources...get like a gig-o-ram! and im going to have to check this out. If it runs as good as you say, ill have to convert.
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post #5 of 7
10/6/03 at 10:05pm
Quote:
Originally posted by aussie
vmware takes a 50% performance hit when you are doing I/O. If you read thru the white paper on Xen they have some comparative benchmarks. One of my reasons for getting the 3.2 8890 was to offset this effect as much as possible when running linux under vmware.

The big difference between Xen and vmware is that Xen is a true virtualisation, there is no "host OS". Each OS is a "guest" if you like. If you have ever played around with IBM's MVS you will get the idea. It provides a set of virtual computers into which you then load your real OS.

vmware is an emulator of sorts rather than a true virtualisation. It runs as an application under the host OS then provides an emulated computer. Hence why vmware can't play games on the ATI hardware - vmware drivers are emulated.

Xen on the other hand could theoretically allow this as each system has a complete (within reason) system. Because of this different approach you don't take the performance hit and direct access to graphics cards would be possible (again in theory).

As they point out it is only a research project (oh well) and does require mods to the OS (which guest OS in vmware dont) to get them to work with Xen. It is the way to go. Maybe Microsoft will provide a Xenized version of XP for general consumption - who knows.
COOL
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post #6 of 7
10/8/03 at 7:28am

VMware

It is worth mentionning that VMware runs 'visibly' more smoothly under a linux host than a windows host. It is effectively better for linux to run a virtual windows than the reverse.

Tried for years, since Vmware 2.03 version. Version 4.02 of the workstation for linux hosts is really a speed improvement. Agree on the ressources point, but hey our lappies have a fair bit of it it seems.

The Xen project is very interesting indeed, apart from the fact that it looks at modifying the OS itself instead of making a real 'Virtualization' of the hardware layer, which consummes lots of ressources, true, but allows to run UNMODIFIED images of operating systems virtually, which is far from being the same with the Xen project ( The OS is being modified to run on Xen, so far the project said Windows XP and a linux host are on the work ). Darn, none of my favorite windows, win 98. Win98 is just old but performs, flyes and it is SOOO light, treaming all the xtra MS ships with it, i can run an MS OS at the cost of 149 Megs disk space. Windows XP.....1.1 Gig no thanks.

Lets wait and give it some maturity. Humm, modifying XP to run on Xen ==> license cost ?
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post #7 of 7
10/8/03 at 7:50am
Thread Starter 
Yeah I agree with your comments laclasse. Early days yet. The concept will take on as it is the ultimate way to go with these new systems.

Interesting comment you make about vmware on XP vs vmware on linux. Is that due to better scheduling under Linux or is it something else?

Unfortunately for me I have to run XP native and Linux as a guest . Although if I need full CPU grunt I can always shut down XP and dual boot to Linux native. Most of the time tho I don't need top end grunt for Linux but I do need it for Windows apps.

I have yet to download vmware as I am still configuring my windows sw.

Am I also correct in thinking that Linux still does not have drivers that will read NTFS? However I believe there are ext3 drivers that allow WinXP to read Linux ext3 FS?

Since I need to tranfer file between both systems with a 60 Gb disk I thought a setup of 30 Gb WinXP under NTFS, 5 Gb FAT for shares, 20 Gb for Linux under ext3.
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