[CoLoCo] virtualization in hardy: kvm

[Kevin Fries]

On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 15:14 -0700, David L. Willson wrote:
> I thought RedHat/Fedora and SUSE were both XEN-centric with regard to virtualization.  No?

Suse is Xen based, and RedHat first make their standard KVM, touting all
the same hype that Ubuntu is now.  It failed.  KVM just does not work as
advertised across different platforms.  Essentially KVM is QEMU with the
accelerator built in.  That accelerator never did work as a free
standing module correctly, so they decided to force QEMU to use it or
fail, then forced the accelerator code into a kernel module, maintained
at the kernel project.  The idea is that it will eventually get enough
attention that it will start working correctly... That was three years
ago, and everyone has all but given up on KVM... Apparently except for
the Ubuntu group which is now trying to go down that same old failed
road.

As for Xen in Fedora... The last I used (about a year ago), it was
offered as it always had as a option.  Suse made deployment part of
Yast, but Fedora/RH have no such mechanism.  You could always add the
kernels via the YUM repositories.  I believe this has not changed since
FC2.  But KVM was the official savior from FC3-FC5, then mysteriously
vanished, and was placed back burner.  I have not used Fedora heavily
past FC6, so I am unsure if Xen was since elevated in its place.  KVM
was such a disaster, I would be surprised if they "anointed" anything.
In RHEL, Xen has always held a higher stature, but RedHat has not been
too happy with XenSource lately, and their apparent back stabbing of
Linux in favor of Microsoft.

Personally, the only one that really did it right was Sun (boy its been
a long time since that could be said in anything but a joke).  They
bought Innotek, and incorporated VBox into Solaris 10.  From what I
hear, the implementation was not as clean as it could be, but not bad.
Give them a few revs, and then lets see how well they did.

-- 
Kevin Fries
Senior Linux Engineer
Computer and Communications Technology, Inc
A Division of Japan Communications Inc.