Re: [SLE] Xen vs. Vmware?

On Friday 12 May 2006 20:37, Greg Freemyer wrote:

On 5/12/06, kevin.kempter@dataintellect.com

wrote:

...

Hi List;

I want to run CentOS within my SuSe 10 install. I have vmware 5.5 installed however I wonder if Xen is a better option. I have a xen grub boot option when I boot but I know nothing about how to setup an OS within it. Can anyone point me in the right direction and/or give me your opinions per xen vs. vmware?

Thanks...

Do you have a CentOS kernel with the XEN paravirtualized drivers built-in (ie. xen disk driver, xen nic driver, xen sound driver, etc.? (IIUC, SuSE 10.0 comes with a special SUSE kernel with the xen drivers built-in just for the guest OS to use.)

If so, Xen might be a good choice since it should run your guest OS faster than VMware does.

If not, you either have use xen with the brand new Intel VT technology (AMD doesn't have it yet), or you have to make the effort of building a new CentOS kernel.

At that point, I would be thinking ov VMware.

I'm running Xen on Athlon 64 and wanted a debian VM. The quick and dirty approach I took was to install debian in vmware, shut it down and open the debian disk in a SuSE VM I then used DD to get the disk into a image file. I mounted the debian image as a loopback filesystem and copied the SuSE xen kernel modules into the disk image. I then booted the debian image using the SuSE xen kernel and initrd with xen. I had to hand craft the xen config file for the VM but I'm getting used to that now. -- David Bottrill david@bottrill.org www.bottrill.org Registered Linux user number 330730 Internet Free World Dialup: 683864