Alexey Eremenko wrote:
hi all !
I wrote an article about different types of Virtualization here: http://www.violtan.com/ae/virtualization.html
This article describes 4 stages of Virtualization: Emulation, Full Virtualization, Para-Virtualization and OS-level Virtualization.
I believe that openSUSE must excel at all types of Virtualization.
Agreed, I've played with some of them. I've always found the concept interesting and very useful in the enterprise ever since we at Amdahl went down that road with full purpose back in the 1980's and stole a decent temporary advantage over IBM. VM was waning and IBM didn't see a future for Virtualization, they certainly never looked at doing it in hardware and it was several years before PR/SM saw the light of day.
openSUSE did some progress in terms of Virtualization: namely we consider integrating VirtualBox into openSUSE.
Just yesterday I tried building Virtualbox on x86_64, only to be greeted with the message that's it's not likely to work on 64-bit any time soon, so that is one serious drawback. I also thought that VMWare had gone opensource, I tested a number of their 6.0 Workstation Betas, now I find the 6.0 release is for purchase only, so I'll leave that for the Corporates with deep pockets.
Until now openSUSE is too focused on Xen. Xen-centric approach is bad. We need a wide array of technologies in openSUSE. Qemu and DOSbox emulators are fortunately already included. openSUSE 10.3 kernel also support USB-FS (allows for using USB in guest VMs) , KVM (Qemu-accelerator) and VMI (kernel paravirtualization) each of these technologies improve Virtualization further.
I only recently got a box capable of running KVM, modules kvm, kvm_amd and kqemu are loaded, but I haven't gone beyond that so far.
One thing we still lack is OS-level Virtualization: such as OpenVZ - this technology allows for partial virtualization at speeds unreachable for Xen.
The most serious problem with bringing OpenVZ to openSUSE is: their project is too RedHat-centric. This is a serious issue, because all of their documentation, packages, utilities, templates and even source-code patches are RedHat-centric, and none of their software work on SUSE. I have failed to bring this technology to openSUSE. I hope there are SUSE developers around who can break their RedHat monopoly and bring this excellent technology to SUSE.
They also lag way behind the latest kernel developments, we're heading to 2.6.22 while their latest is for 2.6.20.
Again: I vote for wide array of Virtualization solutions in openSUSE (instead of being Xen-centric).
I have several more interesting ideas considering Virtualization, such as building a bridge between UnionFS and OpenVZ.
Who are the people responsible for virtualization efforts in openSUSE ?
Good question, very little has been seen on the list and it has all been about Xen. Hopefully you have smoked a healthy discussion out into the open. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Licensed Private Pilot Emeritus IBM/Amdahl Mainframes and Sun/Fujitsu Servers Tech Support Specialist, Cricket Coach Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org