[Wolves] Xen

[Richard Smedley]

On Thu, 2007-01-11 at 20:45 +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
> I have not had first hand experience with Virtuozzo but I have
> researched it a fair bit.  It's a bit like BSD jails in that it's a
> sort of super chroot -- everything runs under one kernel.  I have
> read that it offers slightly more performance than Xen (which makes
> sense since it's a more lightweight form of virtualisation), and it
> has a more mature system of measuring out resources.

South Cheshire LUG is hosted on a Virtuozzo server from
line3.co.uk, along with many of my sites. However M6-IT
will be moving to a wholly Free Software hosting solution 
soon - no complaints about line3, who are excellent, just
a wish to practise what we preach.

Virtuozzo seems a very powerful solution, but note that 
the underlying tech is all available as Free Software 
http://openvz.org/ - for those that can live without the 
last word in automation and whizzy GUIs ;-)

One of the best benefits of virtualisation, of course, is
reduced energy consumption. It's this that will lead to
it being the norm in the very-near future, I feel.

> You can't give different virtual servers different kernels, and you
> can't run anything other than Linux, but to be honest I have never
> had to do that so far with Xen anyway.  One guy asked for Plan 9 but
> I was out of capacity at the time and he went to Black Cat I
> believe.

Plan9:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/sources/contrib/uriel/slides/fosdem06/guru.gif
[1]

 - it actually seems to be enjoying a quiet mini-revival atm.
Is anyone here using it for anything?

 - Richard

[1] Untampered original is:
http://folk.uio.no/hpv/linuxtoons/dilbert-unix.png