Do you use virtual servers?
Submitted by root
| No |
   39% | 228 votes |
| Yes, Several |
9% | 54 votes |
| Qemu |
9% | 53 votes |
| UML |
2% | 17 votes |
| VMWare |
24% | 143 votes |
| Xen |
10% | 63 votes |
| Other |
4% | 25 votes |
| Total 583 votes |
[ Send Message | View Steve's Scratchpad | View Weblogs ]
Each of these tools has different uses, and I've used them all!
VMWare is the one I preferred for running Windows 2000 - on the rare times I've needed to do so. Sadly my 30 day evaluation copy has now expired, so I'll not be using it in the future, unless a miracle occurs and I can afford to purchase a copy.
Qemu is what I used before that for running Windows. I've mostly ceased using it now though. The only place I still use Qemu is for emulating Debian's Woody release - so I can build Debian Security Updates, on the rare times I do that. (There is a woody image with X setup here). The Debian buildd network manages building for all the platforms except the initial binary target which is uploaded.
UML I liked for a long time, and I used it a lot before Qemu was a viable system. I prefer it because the Debian package is supported much better and doesn't require playing around with custom kernels. It is also damn sexy to see it working in its own little window! Although UML was good in its day, and I got a lot of indirect use out it when I was renting an UML virtual machine to host this site before it became necessary to move it to a dedicated server!
Finally I've jumped on the Xen bandwagon. Recently I posted an introduction for Sarge and shortly I'll be posting a brief guide to compiling kernels upon Sid systems.
Xen rocks, but without X11 I suspect I will have to revert to Qemu sometimes. Not so much of a problem just yet since I do have a real Sarge system installed and running ..
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[ Send Message | View todsah's Scratchpad ]
One unfortunate thing about Qemu is that it doesn't seem possible to use the -snapshot option to write to a snapshot file which can later be applied to the base image at run-time. This way you could have, for instance, a base Debian system with different configuration snapshots without taking up diskspace for a complete image for each configuration.
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What would be cool (I would if I had the extra bandwidth) would be for someone to host virtual images. I know one of the OpenZaurus developers has a complete OESF bitbake environment for VMware, and there are other scattered around the net, but it would be nice to have one-stop shopping for virtual images.
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[ Send Message | View todsah's Scratchpad ]
There used to be the Free OS Zoo, which had a whole slew of images of free operating systems. It seems to be down now unfortunately :(
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[ Send Message | View Steve's Scratchpad | View Weblogs ]
There are a couple of mirrors still alive for the zoo.
Google found these:
They aren't dated too recently, but the images appear to be good still.
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If true, this will be no problem for me, because I will have my regular desktop in Dom0 and use DomUs only for server tihngies (one for honeypot, one for testing unstable, one for regular web/mail/ldap servers).
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[ Send Message | View Steve's Scratchpad | View Weblogs ]
That is correct.
You can kinda cheat by using VNC, and XForwarding, but there doesn't appear to be a way to run an actual X11 desktop.
I'm running things the way you suggest with my "host" kernel happily running X11, and the virtual instances all "headless" running server things like SSH, Apache.
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Xen has a cool new couple of features that I am bussy experimenting with - and I would encourage you to check out the paper on live migration of VM's (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/netos/papers/2005-migration-nsdi-pre.pdf).
Anyway - VMWare seems to be the best for Windows related VM's. Sad as it may sound, most of us has to do some kind of testing on Windows. In my case it's testing IE and other Windows based browsers.
UML was a very good option until Xen arrived. I still have one of my sites hosted on a UML based solution at http://www.linode.com/
Exiting times in the VM space.
Cheers
Nic
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Joh 3:36
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