Linux team tells VMware and Xen to get their acts together (Register)

Posted May 2, 2006 22:43 UTC (Tue) by dps (guest, #5725)
In reply to: Linux team tells VMware and Xen to get their acts together (Register) by dlang
Parent article: Linux team tells VMware and Xen to get their acts together (Register)

The last time I heard about this subject VMware emualated a PC right down to the hardware level (presumably using x86 virtual mode). The performance hit for things like I/0 was not trivial. I think the VMWare people claim to have made things faster here, but they also said nobody could do "unapproved" benchmarks so trustworthy data is non-existant.

Xen, on the other hand, requires some fairly drastic kernel changes, especially in the memory management area. They claim that this allows them to make the hit for the virtualisation much less and provide data to back this claim up. Random people can repeat their benchmarks.

A merger sounds mildly unlikely. The xen people coulsd credibly argue that VMI buys them nothing... why you anyone *expect* a Xen 2.x client to run on a Xen 3.x microkernel (sorry, hypervisor) box?

I do not see Xen and vmware as competing products. IF you want M$ windows, or anything else with no source changes, you need VMWare. If source changes are not a problem then Xen might be a higher performance solution.