VMware, XenSource Join Forces For Linux

porjo writes "Peace has been established on at least one front: XenSource and VMware are working together to improve virtualization in the Linux kernel. Their original disagreement has been displaced by a commitment to work on a solution together, says Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource, the company that builds products around Xen virtualization software. The two are trying to come up with a common approach to virtualization support in the Linux kernel. [snip] The work now under way would let hypervisors from Microsoft, VMware, and Xen work together in the same data center. Under such a scenario, it would be possible for a Xen virtual machine, trapped on a piece of failing hardware, to be automatically moved over to a VMware hypervisor on another piece of hardware."

Re:Which systems support Windows clients?

[Trelane]

There seem to be a range of choices if I want Linux client OS, including Xen, VMWare, User-Mode Linux, etc., and some for BSD client OS, but is the VMWare server for Linux the only free choice if I want to support Windows clients?

At this level, it is because Microsoft VirtualPC doesn't support a Linux host, Xen requires modifications that (apparently) they can't legally use with a Windows client, UML is User Mode Linux (not Windows) and requires kernel-level modifications (obviously unavailable outside of Redmond, WA, USA), and Win4Lin has no free offering. (These are the only ones I'm familiar with) With Hypervisor, however, Xen no longer requires the legally-questionable mods, so there's hope for the future if you don't like VMWare. So, the answers seem to be: lack of support, lack of free, and lack of source.

Otherwise, there're technologies like Bochs, which emulate the actual chip, but are much slower.

Re:Which systems support Windows clients?

[JamesTRexx]

Virtual PC can run Linux distros, you just have to try it. I've had Gentoo run and livecd's based on FreeBSD (PC-BSD and DesktopBSD) and OpenBSD (OliveBSD).
And there's also Qemu [bellard.free.fr] which is available for *nix and Windows. Together with the kqemu accelerator it runs Windows very fast on *nix and vice-versa.
(currently running Windows in Qemu on FreeBSD 6, Ubuntu 6.06 desktop in VMware server on Windows XP and Windows in VMware server on Ubuntu 6.06 desktop)

Re:Which systems support Windows clients?

[LinuxGeek]

Screenshot of XP running on Xen [flickr.com].

Re:Which systems support Windows clients?

[Anonymous Coward]

The poster wants to run Windows on top of Linux, not Linux on top of Windows. Thus, VirtualPC is out.

Re:Which systems support Windows clients?

[spectro]

Xen requires modifications that (apparently) they can't legally use with a Windows client

I understand Xen 3.0.2 can run unmodified windows guests if you have a processor with virtualization extensions (Intel Pentium D 9xx series, or AMD Athlon 64 X2 Windsor series). I am planning to try this out but I need a few months to shell out the $400+ to buy new cpu, mobo, video and DDR2 memory.

Re:What's virtualisation for?

[mattyrobinson69]

You may want to run bind and apache on the same machine, but not have to worry about the security issues of one affecting the other, so you run two virtual machines, each with a seperate server (I know about chroots, but a vm is more secure).

Re:Good thing but..

[mabinogi]

> I should also tell you that I don't even know in what extent these products do cost anything.

Xen is Open Source, and VMWare has two free of cost products - VMWare Player and VMWare Server and two commerical products - VMWare Workstation and VMWare ESX

Re:What's virtualisation for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain to ignorant old me what linux-on-linux virtualisation is for? What problem does it solve?

Well, lets say you run a hosting operation. Normally you rent servers in your data center to your customers.

What if the customer doesn't need a quality server (with scsi raid & redundant power) all to themselves but they still want full control (with root) of the operating system?

Create a linux VM for them. Customer gets a "server" they fully control, running on quality hardware.

Or, what if you're a developer and you want to test your software on different versions of redhat, fedora, debian, mandrake, ubuntu (etc, etc). Are you going to have 10 computers sitting around the office, each with a version of linux installed? That's a lot of space & cost. Just run them in a VM.

Ditto for windows, bsd, etc.

Re:What's virtualisation for?

[martin-boundary]

It's simple. A typical computer running a web server is idle most of the time. With virtualization, you can run many OSes simultaneously on a single machine. That's attractive to web hosting providers who can buy one beefed up server and pretend they have a gazillion separate machines. So each customer gets a dedicated "computer" for running their website, but there's only one real machine to pay for, do maintenance on, and lease space in the colo.

s/web server/other service/g

Re:What about OpenVZ?

[ovz_kir]

OpenVZ is an OS-level virtualisation -- this is quite different technology from that of Xen and VMware. OpenVZ provides separate isolated containers within a *single* kernel image, while Xen makes possible to run *different* kernels on the same piece of hardware. More info about those differences is here [openvz.org]; the only thing I want to add is VMware is moving into Xen direction.