Linux Virtulization Options (or to KVM or not to KVM?).

[Dan Ritter]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 12:51:27AM -0400, Mick T wrote:
> I'm in the process of replacing a few older servers, and I think this
> would be a good opportunity to take advantage of virtualization to save
> on hardware and related costs. Both Red Hat and Ubuntu are moving to
> using KVM for their virtualization choice. I'm leaning towards using
> Ubuntu with KVM as a host for both Linux and Windows 2003 server guests.
> My google-fu hasn't turned much information about the performance of
> guests, nor many hints of large scale implementations.
> 
> Has anyone used KVM with both Linux and Windows guests and would like to
> share their experiences or advise? 
> 
> I'm interested in how stable KVM is, and how well guest OS's perform
> under KVM. And if anyone has done any (or come across any) performance
> comparisons between KVM and VMWare and any other virtualization
> technologies? 
> 
> Plus, how easy is it to use? I want to make sure that less-experienced
> folk will be able to manage whatever I build with minimal intervention
> from me.

I have a bunch of Debian Etch/32 VMs running on Debian Lenny/64
hosts with KVM.

It's production-quality stable. Note that the stability of your
VM's kernel is important -- several tests with other distros did 
not go well. I also found that emulating the e1000 NIC was much
better than anything else for this.

Using the Red Hat-developed libvirt tools is very simple, at
least on a par with VMWare's products. For more complex
scenarios, it's a good idea to read the man pages and make sure
you understand what you're doing.

-dsr-



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