Xen ... Whos's Using It? ... Should there be a separate forum? ...Beginner questions.

I've just spent a couple hours reading about virtualization on the net. It seems to be a rapidly maturing technology that is more talked about than used. I ran a "Titles only" search here, and most of the hits were from LXer, but obviously a few folks here were experimenting. From what little I can understand, it seems to completely replace the need for such programs as VMWare and Wine.

Would the general feeling here be that one should simply start with an installation of Xen 3.0, or does a relatively inexpensive commercial product, such as Parallells, make more sense for a literate, semi-technical beginner?

Could each OS have it's own firewall rules? What would happen in that case if two OSes were running concurrently. Could a given Guest OS (WinXP) be completely isolated from the internet while others had normal access?

Would it make sense for Jeremy to set up a separate Virtualization forum, though it's a bit ahead of even the early-adopters?

I have absolutely no idea of what you are talking about!!!
If it is something new, then yes, we definitely should have a forum.

Learning something new, at the time, is much better than being told about it afterwards.

I have moved this to the Suggestions and Feedbac forum. This has been asked before and the present rate of traffic for the questions don't warrant a seperate forum or sub forum.

However, this sort of thing is monitored and reviewed constantly and, if the rate of trafic increases substantially, a new forum could be considered.

Aha! No sooner considered, than help arriving. DistroWatch informs me that there is now a LiveCD/Demo, that should answer a lot of questions. Comes with small versions of Debian, Suse, and CentOS preinstalled.

Originally Posted by rickh Aha! No sooner considered, than help arriving. DistroWatch informs me that there is now a LiveCD/Demo, that should answer a lot of questions. Comes with small versions of Debian, Suse, and CentOS preinstalled.

I just grabbed this and tried to run it. Two tries--first Debian and then CentOS. In both cases, the video would not sync up when it tried to launch X. I could not get to a terminal using ctrl-alt-fx and had to resort to "armstrong" shutdown.
This is the first time a live CD has failed to run on ANY of my computers.

Dell Precision 360, 1GB, 73GB SCSI, nvidia graphics

RHEL4 is the normal setup, and there is a nvidia driver that needs to be installed for full functionality. Don't know if this is relevant.

XEN is virtualization at a different level than VMWare and WINE is simply an emulator. XEN has virtually no or little delay when operating the "virtual distribution" so you get an near realtime "virtual machine"...it is somewhat difficult to get installed, but since it comes bundled with SuSE and several other mainstream distros, this take some of the mystery out of it.

Hope this helps...

I have had a natural curiosity of Xen for a while and have not had any success as of yet. I too downloaded and burned the image to CD and it booted fine but no "gui".

I have read where some reviewers had the same problem getting it going and here's what one said:

"Otherwise the only glitch in the CD is related to the X configuration; in my case, the default configuration with vesa brought about a blank screen, so I had to boot into text mode and reconfigure /etc/X11/xorg.conf by supplying it with the correct video driver before launching the GDM login manager."

I'm going to "fiddle" with it after I tire of tweaking compiz/beryl on FC6.

Is Xen only for dual processor machines or can it run on single processor (read cheap) machines for testing, educational purposes?

Xen is only available on hardware that supports it. I think it has to be at least P4 generation. Depending on the clock speed of the machine you are thinking about, Qemu with the Qemu accelerator may work for your purposes, or even just Qemu alone.

Finally got around to burning this .iso to a cd and sticking it in the drive. Booted up with no problems whatsoever. I was only able to open two OSes at a time due to memory limitations, but by taking turns, I was able to see all three of them working.

The missus, who makes sure I don't waste my entire life on the computer, is going to Calif in a couple weeks. Hopefully she'll stay long enough for me to replace my 32-bit Debian with this Xen set-up, now that I'm convinced my hardware will handle it.

If I can figure out how to get Windows set up as one of the guest OSes, networked locally with a couple Linuxes, and at the same time kept totally isolated from the internet, I may be able to spare it 12 or 15 gigs.

I don't believe that windows is one of the guest OS's yet, but check their website to see for sure...

it would be nice to have a separate forum for virtual machines such as xen or qemu...not withstanding the logic behind XavierP's reply but because it could be a selling point for those cruising this forum site.

Seeing the forum may make the newbie think there are advantages of linux over Ms?

Even if the whole purpose of the newbie is to run Ms on a linux....we would have them sold.

my 2 cents worth for a vote for a new forum.