From: Martin (inkubus_at_interalpha.co.uk)
Date: Fri 24 Jun 2005 - 22:56:03 BST
> Anyway, I like Vservers. I use Vservers. However owing to the "luck of the
> draw" it looks like Xen is getting lots and LOTS of attention.
FWIW I had a look at Xen as a technology before finding vservers. Given
the problem it solves, it is a very good solution. But for me it is not
the problem I need solving and I believe this is the case with a large
number of other virtualisation problems. Generally the demand seems to
be for a number of logical servers to share the same hardware. Given
most admin preferences / corporate policies, these will normally be the
same operating system (if you're bothered enough to use different OS's
for security / stability you're also bothered enough to put them on
different hardware). For this vservers (and similar on Solaris and
FreeBSD) is the obvious solution, it allows very easy and intuitive
management from the host machine (i.e. vkill and being able to admin all
of the host filesystems simultaneously) which would be very difficult ot
implement using the Xen model. Also it doesn't have some of the
overheads that Xen and other solutions have, such as swap / memory
useage algorithms clashing between layers and having the overhead of
running multiple kernels.
They both solve their own problems well and each others problems not so
well IMHO. I just wish people would stop billing Xen as the solution ot
vserver style problems.
But that's just my 2p's worth.
> Then again, if the Solaris people got their Linux emulation stuff (Janus?)
> working properly, you could also run your Linux servers inside Solaris
> Containers!
To a degree but I believe this is just userland emulation so you
wouldn't get everything. Now what would be fun is to use the Solaris /
Irix / *BSD compatability layers in Linux to see if you could run
$OTHEROS based userlands in vservers. Should be possible, would be cool
and would probably help debug the compatability layers no end. Might
hazard a guess that some shenanigans of this sort with Wine might be
possible... but then I guess that's vservers getting into Xen territory.
Cheers,
- Martin
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