OSNews

You can find nForce NIC drivers at
http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng/

Hope this helps

I think the writer is a bit hungry to make command :-)

Yes, these days some people seems to do write articles/news announcements just to point out what other people doesn't have instead of talking about what they have. How many news announcements have you seen lately in osnews and other geek sites where (like in this one) linux was explicitely mentioned as a reference to beat?

In the past it was linux users who used to write countless manipulated articles pointing out how good linux was compared with Windows/BSDs/Solaris. It sucked, it was like linux users had a strong need of "feeling" superior to others. When linux started performing really well and started to run and win benchmarks in servers with hundred of CPUs, people somewhat stopped doing it. Now that everybody recognizes that linux works and it's getting attraction from the market, it looks like non-linux people starts doing the same, like Linux was "the reference to beat" (not that it's not true sometimes, ie: one of the reasons why the TCP/IP stack was rewritten in solaris 10 was that linux was beating solaris - according to them). In this particular case, notice how the news header loves to point out the lack of a virtualization technology in linux, "forgetting" to mention other virtualization technologies available in linux. While I don't think they did it on purpose (they copied the text from the link), it makes news sites to look uninformed and biased.

Edited 2006-07-06 13:34

>Is Firefox in the mainline kernel?

That's about as irrelevant comment as I could imagine.

What *is* relevant is whether the virtualization solution is in the kernel that's supported by your support provider, and by kernels required by third party packages.

From that point of view, Linux is starting to get Xen support, right? Which is a different kettle of fish again (so much so that for example Solaris will have Xen too, eventually).

Hopefully in a few months the rate of change will have settled down and it will be possible to evaluate the various solutions. It seems a bit early yet.

From that point of view, Linux is starting to get Xen support, right? Which is a different kettle of fish again (so much so that for example Solaris will have Xen too, eventually).

yep, they can't be matched. Different world altogether

Zones have less demands and less possibilities. While this is good because ram consumption is smaller and they have their own benefits, pure virtualization is not possible with zones. You can't migrate zones from machine to machine you can only do that internaly, etc.

Cases when you need zones and cases when you need xen have practically nothing in common. Personally, I never needed jails on BSD or VZ on Linux. Xen? I use xen daily on my devel machine and a lot of servers.

Hopefully in a few months the rate of change will have settled down and it will be possible to evaluate the various solutions. It seems a bit early yet.

In few month best you will have is mediocre support. So, no, it won't be possible to match them.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1983118,00.asp

summer 2007 is closer timeframe. Although this is only the HW support part, linux integration on the other hand includes SELinux xen0 manageable xenU domains also. Which means that Solaris will have to support its own security model to get full support and article only notes about supporting xen0 and xenU in that timeframe.

You might want to read this about migrating zones from one machine to another:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/submitted/zone_replication.html

you are joking aren't you??? either that or you don't know what xen migration is.

That step you pointed out is obvious to any *niX child. Basically it is equal to copying VMWare image from one machine to another.

I was talking about LIVE migration with zero cost downtime, not image migration. Where do you live? Still in 90's?

Just example: Xen people tested migration on running quake server (but in reality it was bouncing between two machines non-stop, while users were normaly playing) and observed if users will notice. It is something completely different to move running server than server which is in standstill and waiting to be moved. You can't shutdown critical services and say "good morning dear fortune 10000, today there's no access to server because we are migrating it to different hardware"

p.s. Not to be sounding like I'm bashing zones. Zones are great, but they are not big league. Although they are quite a weapon for big players (combine zone with xen, what you get? a 7th wonder)

Edited 2006-07-06 20:20

[*] Solution - in my understanding means intgrated and supported proposition either by distribution vendor or as a part of main-line kernel. Separately maintained set of patches which drasticaly changes behaviour of kernel are not counting.

Most linux distributions use a separately maintained set of kernel patches that drastically change the behavior of the kernel, and that's just the default kernel. Many of them now ship a kernel image with dom0 and/or domU support for Xen (some are even officially supported). Some of them offer an unsupported kernel image suitable to host OpenVZ or VServer virtual private servers (VPS), which are OS-level virtualization solutions like Zones.

I've used both Zones and OpenVZ. They have virtually identical feature sets, and I found OpenVZ's utilities to be simpler.

With next-generation virtualization support in hardware (Pacifica/Vanderpool), patches for Xen domU support will no longer be required, and therefore distributions will be able to offer both paravirtualization and OS-level virtualization on the same system concurrently. This is not redundant, and it's actually a very useful model for server workload, maintenance, and availability management.

Besides, the facility to install Zone templates on Nexenta is based on debootstrap (a Debian tool), and it will only install Nexenta-based Zones, whereas OpenVZ has the concept of a template cache to allow support for VPSs based on multiple different Linux distributions to run concurrently on the same host, which itself can be a distinct flavor of Linux.

I have a system based on Gentoo with the openvz-sources kernel that boots N identical SLES 9-based VPSs on startup (where N is specified at the boot prompt), and it provides enough resource isolation to run Linux-HA (Heartbeat) clustering across the VPSs. It didn't take too much hacking to get it to work, and it showed my boss that it's indeed possible to run clustering software in an OS-level virtualized environment.

I hate to say it, but criticisms of Linux aren't always invalid. Linux ought to get more security stuff into the mainline kernel, lest it become a big fat target when the Windows empire comes crashing down. Bugfix patches alone might not be able to hold up.

(It is true that something doesn't have to be in the mainline kernel to be a valid solution, but being separate makes things more difficult. Also, what you say about Firefox is a straw man... This is kernel-level stuff we're talking about.)

Zones offer server virtualizion - you get n virtualized
application execution environments. The kernel is shared.

server virtualization does not necessarily equal virtual
servers.

True virtual servers will be LDOMS (and Xen) in the not
too distant future - these will of course allow the
current server virtualization (zones) to be layered on
top. Sun also has dynamic system domains on the higher
end systems which allow dynamic physical
(with electrical) separation.

True virtual servers will be LDOMS (and Xen) in the not too distant future - these will of course allow the current server virtualization (zones) to be layered on top. Sun also has dynamic system domains on the higher end systems which allow dynamic physical (with electrical) separation.

yep, as soon as that happens REAL power will be there. In combining both techs that is.

Zones don't virtualise every piece of hardware (yet?). Quantaties of CPU and memory can't be allocated to a zone, instead each zone just uses system cpu's and memory directly.
You can control usage smewhat by using the Solaris resource management, however this is not the same as having it truely virtualised.

Quantities of CPU and memory can be allocated to a zone, along with some other resources. The CPU allocation is calculated by the process scheduler, and gives very flexible and accurate control over allocation between zones and within zones. It is every bit as good as other virtualization technologies, and most of the time better. The control of memory certainly not as good as CPU, as it is monitored and controlled by a background process. This is where I would agree with your "somewhat" branding.

Do you think each zone should have its own process scheduler and memory allocator?

FreeBSD has jails for virtualization. It is a very good solution. In fact, the idea for Zones was lifted from BSD. Linux has OpenVZ and VServer. While neither are part of the mainline kernel, it is trivial to install either one for anyone who wants to do virtualization. When Sun announced Zones, my reaction to it was "about time" rather than cool. If you want to brag about Solaris technology, brag about ZFS and Dtrace, forget about Zones.

Actually a brag about dtracing a distributed application across several zones (which are mounted on ZFS), is acutally a cool brag. I would not forget zones so quickly.

Well, Nexenta practically is Ubuntu on OpenSolaris instead of Linux. Maybe that's just what you want.

Edited 2006-07-06 14:23