Xen devel - Mar 2005 - RE: trying to get vmware working inside xen0 or xenU

I''m in the situation Tupshin Harper describes in
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=10771264.

We have a production environment where Xen is an excellent fit, but we want
to run Windows Server 2003 under a VM on our Debian host.

I saw Ian Pratt''s response
(http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=10771267) and a slide
(http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~walpole/class/cs533/slides/152.ppt#269,11,Xen and
the CPU) indicating the rings of x86 privilege. Is there a definitive answer
on having VMWare (and Windows) co-exist with Xen domains? Could this answer
be posted in the FAQ for Xen along with reference material?

I also noticed http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-207R1.pdf
which would have me use a normal host, then set up a Windows VM peer in
VMWare with a Xen machine in VMWare. If we have to handle VMWare + Xen this
way, it kinda sucks the value right out of Xen. The best solution we could
hope is to wipe our nice Debian install for Windows 2003 as the base, then
have Xen within a single VMWare. A difficult proposition with 1.2 TB online
under Reiserfs already.

Comments? Ideas? Suggestions? Directions?

--Romaq





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On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, William (Andy) Smith wrote:
> We have a production environment where Xen is an excellent fit, but we want
> to run Windows Server 2003 under a VM on our Debian host.
I wonder if Qemu (with acceleration module) would do the
trick.  It shouldn''t be much slower than vmware anyway.

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan


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> On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, William (Andy) Smith wrote:
> > We have a production environment where Xen is an excellent fit, but we
> > want to run Windows Server 2003 under a VM on our Debian host.
>
> I wonder if Qemu (with acceleration module) would do the
> trick.  It shouldn''t be much slower than vmware anyway.
I''d expect QEmu with the acceleration module to have lower kernel / IO 
intensive performance than VMWare because I think it''s less clever
there.
For CPU intensive code, I believe it''s about the same (i.e. close to
native).

The QEmu accelerator module is also binary-only and contains cli / sti 
instructions, so I''m not sure how happy it''ll be running on
Xen.

Cheers,
Mark


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