virtualizing...

[Stephen Adler]

Hello all.... My thanks giving day project is to learn about 
virutalization (beyond vmware) and try and get either KVM or Xen up and 
running. I've poked around the Internet and in true fashion, there is a 
lot out there but its hard to digest the first time around. What I can 
see is that there are two kinds of virtual environments which I'm 
interested in. KVM or Xen and each can run in paravirtualization mode or 
full virtualization mode. From what I can tell paravirt mode needs a 
modified kernel, but runs faster and full virtualization does not need a 
modified kernel but runs slower.

My plan is to run windows vista in as a guest OS, so I supposed this 
forces me to use full virtualization(?) If I want to run a Linux guest 
OS, then I run a Xen modified kernel as the guest? I'm a bit confused 
about what it means to have a modified and unmodified OS. (I think I 
understand unmodified, but I'm not sure what a modified OS is...)

Has anyone had to hash through this lately?

Thanks. Steve.