[!! SPAM] RE: Virtualization recommendation

[Shlomi Fish]

On Wednesday 16 September 2009 15:53:10 geoffrey mendelson wrote:
> On Sep 16, 2009, at 3:38 PM, Amos Shapira wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Just as a comment, I run virtualbox under MacOS and it works perfectly
> fine. So far I've run Windows/XP and Windows 7, DOS, and Ubuntu
> virtual machines and they work. Complete with network support and USB
> devices that MacOS won't support.
> 

And I've used the Mandriva package of Virtual Box successfully on my Mandriva 
Cooker system, without any major problem I could recall, and it's a life-
saver. While it does have an enhanced proprietary version, the open-source 
version (fully GPLed, etc.) works perfectly well, and is 100% open-source. 

If anyone misses the features in the proprietary version, they are allowed to 
develop them on their own while complying with the GPL licence of Virtual Box. 
See for example what was done with SugarCRM and vTigerCRM.

I should note that this is not the first time, an open-source project had 
proprietary versions. For example: Ghostscript (with its GNU/GPL versions and 
the more recent sourceware but proprietary one), X-Windows (with various 
proprietary spin-offs), SleepyCat's Berkeley DB (a strong copyleft licence, 
with a commercial version), Qt (formerly GPLed, now also LGPLed), Cygnus 
offered commercial support for GNU software which was kept open-source and 
GPLed, and there's also naturally RHEL with CentOS and other free clones.

So I don't think you can claim the open-source version of Virtual Box is not 
FOSS. My machine does not have any hypervisoring extensions (which rule out 
KVM) and I'd rather not run Xen directly as the hypervisor [Xen] so Virtual 
Box seems like the best solution and it works very well. Virtual Box was a 
simple "urpmi" (= Mandriva's equivalent of "apt-get" or "yum") command away, 
and it's a native Mandriva package, which says:

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
shlomi:~$ rpm -qi virtualbox
Name        : virtualbox                   Relocations: (not relocatable)
Version     : 3.0.6                             Vendor: Mandriva
Release     : 1mdv2010.0                    Build Date: Thu 10 Sep 2009 
18:16:26 IDT
Install Date: Fri 11 Sep 2009 10:14:15 IDT      Build Host: n1.mandriva.com
Group       : Emulators                     Source RPM: 
virtualbox-3.0.6-1mdv2010.0.src.rpm
Size        : 37003949                         License: GPLv2
Signature   : DSA/SHA1, Thu 10 Sep 2009 18:41:02 IDT, Key ID dd684d7a26752624
Packager    : Frederic Crozat <fcrozat at mandriva.com>
URL         : http://www.virtualbox.org/
Summary     : A general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware
Description :
VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE) is a general-purpose full
virtualizer for x86 hardware.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I do wish Fedora supported it better, but it seems that Fedora is not very 
inclusive.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish
 
> So while you may have had problems with it under Ubuntu (I won't go
> into how many problems I have had with Ubuntu), I would not discount
> it entirely in other enviornments.
> 
> It fits my needs quite nicely, I'm sure it does not fit everyones.
> 
> Geoff.
> 

[Xen] - back when I worked as software developer for a company that developed 
10 Gbps Ethernet adaptors, my niche ended up as being in charge of making sure 
our (open-source) Linux drivers ran in Xen (and Xen Enterprise) and on VMWare 
ESX. 

Xen Enterprise which was based on the 2.6.x kernel just worked and gave me 
very little trouble in my testing. 

VMWare ESX was based on an old Linux 2.4.x kernel, and caused me many 
problems. It only recognised one port of our two port card (of no fault of our 
driver - it was a global problem with ESX), and gave me many other problems. I 
recall that I kept needing to re-install VMWare ESX on that machine.

As a result, I spent much more time on ESX and really hated it. I should note 
that the VMware people were very fair to us, and we were given read access to 
the code inside their Subversion repository, and other forms of support. I'm 
also pretty sure VMWare ESX is a very decent virtual machine server, but as a 
drivers' developer, it gave me a lot of trouble.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Understand what Open Source is - http://shlom.in/oss-fs

Chuck Norris read the entire English Wikipedia in 24 hours. Twice.