[Novalug] Virtualization setup

Subba Rao castellan2004-novalug@yahoo.com
Sun Apr 12 08:30:42 EDT 2009


A year or so ago at the VMware users group meeting in MD, I learned that ESX is a proprietary micro kernel.  The VMware engineer said that the micro kernel handles the process/memory management issues.

Looking at the RedHat, SuSe and other linux distros that have VM management tools, how is it any different from VMware workstation running on Windows?  On Windows, it is annoying that everytime I am trying to access a disk partition for analysis, I get all sorts of headaches related to Windows access controls, NTFS headaches etc.

I want to have only one laptop/system with a few VMs on them.  It looks like you do need to have a host OS in anycase.

Subbarao

--- On Sun, 4/12/09, Pete Nuwayser <nuwayser@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Pete Nuwayser <nuwayser@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Novalug] Virtualization setup
To: castellan2004-novalug@yahoo.com
Cc: "NOVA LUG" <novalug@calypso.tux.org>
Date: Sunday, April 12, 2009, 7:57 AM

If you go with one of the lightweight bare-metal products such as
RHEV-H, VMware ESXi, Windows Hyper-V Server 2008 or the like, you will
need a separate management host.  If your goal is to use only one
system only and not dabble with the hypervisor, you're better off
using a virtualization capability (and management tools!!!) that are
added on to a full-fledged core server OS, such as RHEL, CentOS,
Fedora, SLES, openSUSE, Ubuntu+KVM+VirtualBox, VMware Server (formerly
GSX), Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V (not to be confused with
Windows Hyper-V Server 2008), etc.

KVM itself is not a hypervisor like xen, vmkernel, etc., and therefore
you don't need a separate version of the kernel that supports it.
Technically, I guess the kernel itself is the "hypervisor."  With KVM
and Hyper-V you do need virtualization enabled in your hardware (look
for vmx in /proc/cpuinfo on Intel chips or svm on AMD chips).  Also
Hyper-V only runs on 64-bit hardware, fwiw... and, oh yeah, there's
that Windows Server 2008 requirement as well :-P

I think the nice thing about Red Hat's strategy is hypervisor
neutrality.  Their management layer works with xen, kvm, openvz and
others.  That way they can focus on the important stuff like
enterprise features and management ease-of-use... and pizza!  ;-D

Pete

On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 6:17 AM, Subba Rao
<castellan2004-novalug@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Good morning everyone,
>
> I am planning to upgrade my laptop in a few months.  On my current laptop I
> run Vista with VMware workstation for several of my Linux distros.  I want
> to switch to using bare metal hypervisor such as VMware's ESXi.  While
> researching I found there are several other free hypervisors such as kvm,
> xen etc.  For me, I don't really want to dabble with the hypervisor
> configuration and other learning curve issues.  My goal is to have couple of
> forensics related linux distros which have access to the hard disk and other
> hardware.  In my current setup, I have to deal with lot of permission issues
> for accessing the hardware.
>
> Is anyone in this forum running a bare metal hypervisor on their laptop?
> Any recommendation on how to plan this setup?
>
> Thank you.
>
> Subbarao
> _______________________________________________
> Novalug mailing list
> Novalug@calypso.tux.org
> http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/novalug
>
>



-- 
Pete Nuwayser

+ let the customer talk +
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.firemountain.net/pipermail/novalug/attachments/20090412/e7011b7b/attachment.htm>


More information about the Novalug mailing list