better platform for virtualization

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

Jonathan Ben Avraham <yba at tkos.co.il> writes:

> Hi Gilad,
> Why do you recommend KVM over XEN? Have you fiddled with both? Are
> there particular problems with XEN?

Apart from the fact that XEN is paravirtualization technology and
running a mission-critical Windows DomU is possible mostly in theory?

Disclaimer: I have not touched Xen over a couple of years (when
Windows guests were possible on KVM, at least in principle, and not
possible on Xen). I checked the current docs out of curiousity and
phrases like "PV drivers are being developed" and "you need to disable
driver signature checking on (every!) reboot" [original emphasis]
don't inspire much confidence.

Other points Gilad made (KVM being much less intrusive and already in
the vanilla kernel and provided by RedHat) are very much valid.

To the OP: Xen is not for you. I have no first-hand experience (beyond
a tiny bit of tinkering) with KVM. I have quite a bit of production
experience with VMware. I am surprised that most of the postings focus
on the VMware Server (previously known as GSX). IIRC the OP mentioned
"crucial" servers but did *not* say $0 was a requirement. I'd go with
ESX for mission-crtical stuff.

For a serious installation I would not keep data (or system images,
for that matter, but YMMV) on directly attached disks.

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org