[svlug] Bagels and 'Buntu7.10 - Saturday installfest

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt at gmail.com):

> I have heard lots of people talk about Xen working pretty well,
> especially with openSUSE, which we will be using on one of the boxes. And I
> know that Xen is in the openSUSE repositories, because I have bumped into it
> on YAST.  

I'll be curious to see how good openSUSE 10.3's implementation is, as
Xen has historically had quite a few rough edges in the usability
department.  Red Hat made significant strides towards making Xen truly
practical in RHEL 5.0, especially as to management and creation of VMs
using virt-manager, an area where Novell's SLES10/SLED10 didn't (IMVAO)
compare well.

For many scenarios, you will want to make sure your CPU includes the
necessary hardware instructions to support hardware virtualisation (as
opposed to paravirtualisation):  VT-x (aka Vanderpool) processor
instructions on Intel, or AMD-V (aka SVM) instructions on AMD Opteron.
This makes the Xen layer completely transparent to the guest OS.  You
can tell by looking at the "flags" listing in /proc/cpuinfo:

Intel:  "vmx" flag (requires kernel 2.6.15 or later)
AMD:    "svm" flag (requires kernel 2.6.16 or later)

-- 
Cheers,                              Mia kusenveturilo estas plena da angiloj.
Rick Moen
rick at linuxmafia.com