Citrix Systems is acquiring XenSource, whose founders helped develop the open-source Xen hypervsior, for USD 500 million in a move that caps a significant week in the development of virtualization technology. The XenSource acquisition, which both companies announced Aug. 15, comes just a day after VMware, which has long been the dominant player in the x86 virtualization market, announced an initial public offering of 33 million shares of stock. By the end of its first day of trading, the company's stock closed at almost USD 51 a share.
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Member since:2005-07-10
Do you really think KVM is the right solution? I don't think so. KVM depends heavily on Linux so it has a large foot print in the name of Linux. Each individual VM runs inside a linux process so I don't know how strong isolation or good shceduling you get.
KVM lacks good SMP support as well as good live migration. KVM is more suitable for light-weight virtualization needs like on desktop.
But if you want rock-solid and enterprise level virtualization then you need a hypervisor. This is the reason Microsoft is building a hypervisor for enterprise ignoring their own products Virtual Server which works like KVM.
In future their will be DMA remapping support and device assignment, you would want to have a strong isolation between multiple VMs so you can safely assign hardware resources to them.
Btw XEN not in Linux is due to some kernel maintainer's bullshit. XEN is an excellent project (far ahead of it's competition). Redhat knows that and that is why they included it in their OS. But the politics of kernel developers is preventing it to be as mainstream.
Member since:2007-08-14
KVM *is* the right *technical* solution for opensource. Xen is a bloated hack that has its interest in the times where there was no hardware support for virtualisation (VT/SVM). Now it's just overcomplicated.
Actually, Xen is not just about the hypervisor, as this one is useless without the Dom0... until they reinvent the wheel and reimplement all the drivers and FS support inside the hypervisor. If you crash Dom0 then your machine is dead. Talking about stability, security and strong isolation? Try to read about DomU to hypervisor and Dom0 communications...
KVM is about to catch up with Xen after only 1 year of developpment (it *does* support SMP) and far less ressources. Because it's design is clean.
And no, Microsoft Virtual Server is not working like KVM, not at all (hint, VT/SVM)...
Member since:2005-11-05
Member since:
2005-11-05
butters, I have to agree with you 100% on this one. Take a look at this awesome post from the gnu libc maintainer, ulrich drepper about kvm vs xen:
http://udrepper.livejournal.com/17577.html
This is bookmarking material.
KVM seems to be learning from Xen's mistakes. A good example, Xen's live-migration features connects 2 servers on a lan via an unencrypted tcp socket. Not sure about some people, but I find the idea of transferring raw memory over the wire unsettling at best seeing as how the ssh agent could have my key in it. kvm supports ssh for live migration:
http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/Migration
The guys at qumranet know what they are doing.