[!! SPAM] RE: Virtualization recommendation

[Amos Shapira]

2009/9/16 Oron Peled <oron at actcom.co.il>:
> On Wednesday, 16 בSeptember 2009 00:24:16 Amos Shapira wrote:
>> Yes. We use xen heavily on CentOS 5 at work and am pretty excited that
>> RH 5.4 is out with KVM "preview tech", I'm not an expert but got the
>> impression that KVM might get things better than Xen eventually.
>
> If your CPU support virtualization extensions (egrep 'vmx|svm' /etc/cpuinfo)
> than KVM is definitely the way to go:
>  * KVM is part of upstream kernel since 2.6.20 -- supported by every up
>   to date distribution.
>
>  * VirtualBox may be OK, but it's the kind of "half-free" solution.
>   There's an "Open Source Edition", but you have to use other editions
>   for the full feature set.

I've never considered VirtualBox (or VMware, for that matter) for
anything except that it's included in Ubuntu for desktop, and it had a
very easy interface to setup Windows quickly.
I saw the reference to libvirt in the RHEL 5.4 announcement and might
use it to convert our home-built tools to ease migration from Xen to
KVM.

It's interesting, BTW, I just returned from interviewing about a dozen
system admin candidates in the Silicon Valley and almost all of them
had "VMware" in their "virtualization" checkbox, maybe one had
hands-on experience with Xen, none had experience with linux-ha, Linux
Virtual Server, DRBD - they all used hardware appliances for this
stuff instead of the free open source tools we use (OK, we will move
away from DRBD to iSCSI soon, but still the point was that we
apparently rely on shoe-string style FOSS more than most people I met
in that recruiting blitz).

> Don't fall in the freebies trap -- חופשי זה יותר מחינם

Thanks but you don't have to preach me about this. As someone who
celebrated the 20th anniversary of his first UNIX account a few years
ago, I think I managed to develop a hunch to stay away from such
freebies. Heck - I even cringe when one of my workers praises RedHat
Cluster Suite over Linux-HA (with all of Linux-HA's faults) :)

Cheers,

--Amos