LinuxHam's Journal: Trying out Xen

I'm currently volunteering at two different places that IBM has recently donated servers and workstations to. I've been a professional VMWare ESX consultant for a couple of years now, and I'm a national leader for Grid, OS, and storage virtualization technologies in the group I work for (~800 consultants). As such, I've wanted to help the places I volunteer at get the most out of their server equipment, so I've dabbled in OSS virtualization technologies for some time now. UML was neat, but sucked without the umlbuilder frontend, and even then you were restricted to using RPM-based distros.

So I found Xen a month ago and finally went out and picked up the donated servers so I could configure them. It was funny that some guy here posted how Xen was not obscure, yet I hadn't heard of it until 2 weeks before he made that comment. Anyway, so far I like it. The VMs run at "line speed" if you will, and for once its nice to see some consistent behavior between VMWare ESX and an OSS product in that when running Xen, the "host OS" only sees 128MB of RAM (settable, of course).

We still don't have an OSS alternative hypervisor that allows guests to boot off of the physical CD-ROM drive or a loop-mounted ISO image. Since IBM is throwing their weight behind Xen, integrating SELinux into the product, why can't we close the gap and let it boot right from CDs or images?

Anyway, for those who need and understand the value of virtualization, and maintain "enterprise-class" (>2GB RAM) Linux servers for customers who would rather spend money on hardware than software, check out Xen.