[Discuss] choice of hypervisor (was gracefully shutdown guests)

[Shirley Márquez Dúlcey]

You're right, it's not dead after all. Google, Amazon, and other big users
picked up the development slack, and Citrix (which bought Xensource, the
original backer of Xen) opened up the project to make it possible. The
slideshow on xenproject.org (
http://www.xenproject.org/component/allvideoshare/video/latest/how-to-almost-kill-a-successful-project-and-then-bring-it-back-to-life-lessons-learned-from-the-xen-project.html)
tells a bit of the story.

A bare metal hypervisor like Xen makes sense in some use cases, and a
userspace-oriented one like KVM makes sense in others. It's good to have a
choice.


On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com>wrote:

> Matthew Gillen wrote:
> > The history is a little more convoluted.  Redhat got on board with Xen
> > because at the time it was the more advanced solution.  With RH's
>
> Minor nit: at the time it was the ONLY solution. Xen predates KVM by
> almost 10 years.
>
>
> > Linus much preferred the QEMU/KVM approach, and basically said he'd
> > never bring Xen into the mainline.  Since RH has a policy (a wise one
>
> I don't. KVM isn't a bare metal hypervisor like Xen. Every KVM guest is
> a process running on the Linux host. That's fine as a substitute for
> VMware Workstation but it's not so good for enterprise class virtual
> server racks. It's also not so good for workstation virtualization since
> you can only run KVM guests on Linux hosts thus negating the easy
> portability that makes workstation virtualization so useful.
>
>
> > So basically at this point everyone has thrown their lot in with
> > QEMU/KVM and Xen is pretty much abandoned except for some researchers.
>
> Xen abandoned? Only used by researchers? Perhaps you've never heard of
> Amazon EC2 or Rackspace or Linode. They're only some of the largest VPS
> platforms in the world and they all run on Xen.
>
> --
> Rich P.
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