CentOS - Aug 2010 - xen vs kvm for virtualization on centos/rhel?

as i'm reviewing the courseware for the rhel (centos) course
i'm teaching next week, i'm going to ask the occasional question,
possibly technical, possibly more policy.

  first one involves the choice for virtualization.  the course has a
short section involving virt using xen but everything i've read
suggests that red hat is concentrating on kvm for virt.  thoughts on
that?  i have the freedom to replace the xen section with one covering
kvm instead.

rday

-- 

=======================================================================Robert P.
J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

        Top-notch, inexpensive online Linux/OSS/kernel courses
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn:                               http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
========================================================================

On Mon, 9 Aug 2010, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>  as i'm reviewing the courseware for the rhel (centos) course i'm 
> teaching next week, i'm going to ask the occasional question, 
> possibly technical, possibly more policy.
>
>  first one involves the choice for virtualization.  the course has a 
> short section involving virt using xen but everything i've read 
> suggests that red hat is concentrating on kvm for virt.  thoughts on 
> that?  i have the freedom to replace the xen section with one 
> covering kvm instead.
KVM feels less intrusive to me, but Xen configuration seemed to have a 
shorter learning curve.

I don't really need a lot of performance in my VMs, so I can't comment 
on speed; both do the trick.

Red Hat has done a nice job with virsh and virt-install, which both 
work as advertised whether you're running Xen or KVM.

My suggestion, fwiw, is to figure out if students are more interested 
in maintaining an installed base of VMs or in installing a new VM 
infrastructure. Chances are, maintenance is more Xen-heavy, while KVM 
is more the way forward for new installations.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/

On 08/09/2010 07:06 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>    as i'm reviewing the courseware for the rhel (centos) course
> i'm teaching next week, i'm going to ask the occasional question,
> possibly technical, possibly more policy.
how much of this courseware is open source licensed ? Would you be 
willing to contribute some /all of it towards the CentOS wiki / docs 
effort ?

- KB

On Monday, August 09, 2010 02:06:51 pm Robert P. J. Day
wrote:
>   as i'm reviewing the courseware for the rhel (centos) course
> i'm teaching next week, i'm going to ask the occasional question,
> possibly technical, possibly more policy.
> 
>   first one involves the choice for virtualization.  the course has a
> short section involving virt using xen but everything i've read
> suggests that red hat is concentrating on kvm for virt.  thoughts on
> that?  i have the freedom to replace the xen section with one covering
> kvm instead.
> 
> rday
I recommend using VirtualBOX from Sun. Close to wire speed, no need to alter 
the kernel. Simple and flexible to use.

-- 

Bobby

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 2:06 PM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at
crashcourse.ca> wrote:
>
> ?as i'm reviewing the courseware for the rhel (centos) course
> i'm teaching next week, i'm going to ask the occasional question,
> possibly technical, possibly more policy.
>
> ?first one involves the choice for virtualization. ?the course has a
> short section involving virt using xen but everything i've read
> suggests that red hat is concentrating on kvm for virt. ?thoughts on
> that? ?i have the freedom to replace the xen section with one covering
> kvm instead.
I'm running both Xen and KVM.

If you're using the virt-* tools then RedHat does a pretty decent job
of hiding the underlying virtualization engine. My virt-install script
ran pretty much unchanged from Xen to KVM.  If you're teaching a
troubleshooting course, I think you need to cover both technologies as
I do see a lot of Xen machines out there.  Otherwise I'd concentrate
on KVM and maybe give a few minutes on the differences (how disks are
referenced, setting up bridging adapter, etc..).