Quote:
Originally Posted by john_sm
Hey Folks - We need your help. We were hoping, we could gain from your experience with implementing server virtualization. When should we be using Red Hat Virtualization, Citrix Virtualization, Xen Virtualization, Microsoft Virtualization, Oracle Virtualization and VMWare. I will be very interested in learning from your first hand experince. I will also like to know, under what situations is one virtualization prefered over the other. - Thanks for your help
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I'm admittedly biased (CTO XenSource), but here's my take. If you want to virtualize Windows, the XenSource/Citrix product is the only one worth looking at. The rest all think that just having some PV I/O drivers does the job, but that's far from enough. If you just want to do Linux on Linux, and you're an expert at Linux config and hackery, then use whatever comes with your distro, assuming you don't want any scalable management tools.
Oracle VM has a more up to date version of Xen than RHEL5, and they have at least patched their kernel ahead of where Red Hat is, but their management tool is rudimentary to say the least. Red Hat's is no better, SUSE's is a little better but written in Eclipse, and very slow. Ours, by the way, is entirely Windows based (.net MMC client) so if you are utterly Linux based then you won't want to use it.
Suggest you download our entirely free product 4 VMs linux or Windows, XenServer Express, at
www.citrixxenserver.com; if that's the use case you want, then either that's enough or you'l want to purchase upgrades. Otherwise try FC7 or OpenSUSE or Debian (by the way we ship a Debian VM template with the product), and see what flavor suits you. Also, XenServer requires VT. If you're using pre VT gear, then you're (a) Linux only and (b) prob want to go for one of the Linux versions. But then your management tool options are pretty limited.
Simon