Being quite keen on the concept of virtualisation, I find myself in a bit of a quandary with F7. Being one who needs an uptodate kernel (my laptop power does funny things with older ones) I can''t run Xen because the kernels are too old. Therefore I have QEMU/KVM or Vmware. Though the F7 documents talk lightly about QEMU being all part of the Virtual Machine Manager, it isn''t really; the resulting systems are slow, refuse to boot off valid ISO images and have no configuration options for networking. They don''t even use the system CDROM until you specifically add it after the virtual machine is built. So I use qemu-kvm on the command line; not that the Fedora documents mention that option - thank heaven for Google! But I also see that others are choosing Vmware server to virtualise guests, and I wonder why. qemu-kvm is pretty good and fairly fast, so I''m really asking why people choose to use a 3rd party system instead; is it faster? Coupled with that: is the virtual machine manager going to work properly with QEMU/KVM one day, or are the developers all assuming we''ll go for Xen? And if the latter, when might we get an Xen kernel that''s uptodate? Enquiring minds want to know. JDL
Hi,> Coupled with that: is the virtual machine manager going to work > properly with QEMU/KVM one day, or are the developers all assuming > we''ll go for Xen? And if the latter, when might we get an Xen kernel > that''s uptodate?I''m using qemu/kvm all day long on my laptop, works fine for me. There are a few shortcomings tough. You can''t configure virtual serial and parallel ports yet via libvirt for example. Also not all options are available in the virt-manager GUI, so you''ll have to hand-edit the xml config files from time to time. One very useful thing not visible in the gui is the emulator binary path. You can have that point to qemu for one and to kvm for another VM and have them both run libvirt-managed side-by-side. You can also point it to some wrapper script to sneak in some parameters into the qemu command line for options not (yet) supported by libvirt. So it isn''t (yet) as comforable as vmware, but works well enougth for my needs. cheers, Gerd
John Lagrue wrote:> But I also see that others are choosing Vmware server to virtualise > guests, and I wonder why. qemu-kvm is pretty good and fairly fast, so > I''m really asking why people choose to use a 3rd party system instead; > is it faster?VMWare is a mature piece of software, and it''s mature because it''s been around for 10 years or so. KVM is only about 1/5th as old :-) KVM also requires that your processor supports virtualisation features, and at the moment these types of processors are not very widespread, although in a few years time they will definitely be very common. Because VMWare (and Xen) run on more common hardware, you''ll find more of them about.> Coupled with that: is the virtual machine manager going to work > properly with QEMU/KVM one day, or are the developers all assuming > we''ll go for Xen? And if the latter, when might we get an Xen kernel > that''s uptodate?Yes definitely we want virt-manager to work well with QEMU and KVM. If you have found specific problems, please check out the bug database (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/). Feel free also to join in contributing fixes if you are able. Rich. -- Emerging Technologies, Red Hat - http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/ Registered Address: Red Hat UK Ltd, Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 1TE, United Kingdom. Registered in England and Wales under Company Registration No. 03798903