An Introduction to Full Virtualization With Xen (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 24, 2012 15:08 UTC (Wed) by gnb (subscriber, #5132)
In reply to: An Introduction to Full Virtualization With Xen (Linux.com) by raven667
Parent article: An Introduction to Full Virtualization With Xen (Linux.com)

Agreed for servers people sometimes need to run a VM on their desktop/laptop and there is surprisingly recent and otherwise OK hardware that lacks VT-x.

http://ark.intel.com/products/69669/Intel-Pentium-Process...

is a plausible laptop/low-end desktop CPU, 64-bit, came out this year, no VT-x.

An Introduction to Full Virtualization With Xen (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 24, 2012 16:38 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Friends don't let friends buy Intel if they care about virtualization on low-medium range machines.

Intel intentionally disables features to create market segmentation. AMD does not do this and as such AMD is a superior processor for Linux desktop users that don't want to spend lots of money.

The idea of having the possibility of using Xen-style paravirtualized systems is lovely, but in practice it leaves a lot to be desired.

Two of the biggest reasons for using virtualization are to deal with legacy software that requires a specific configuration and being able to run Windows systems on Linux. Both of those things don't exist for Xen without VT hardware support.

AND if you can take advantage of using Xen PV without changing kernels or anything like that then you will almost always get better performance if you use something like LXC.

An Introduction to Full Virtualization With Xen (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 26, 2012 21:47 UTC (Fri) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (1 responses)

A gaggle of J. Random Developers with laptops that lack VT is not what is sustaining Xen. It must be something else.

An Introduction to Full Virtualization With Xen (Linux.com)

Posted Oct 26, 2012 22:16 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

I believe it's primarily Enterprise Inertia

at one time Xen was "the way to do virtualization" on Linux, and enterprises that setup their networks at that time aren't willing to change.

Actually, I strongly suspect that most of those organizations are still running the OS versions that they installed on the systems, but because of the 'installed base', having Xen updates in new versions is 'important', even for those companies that aren't running the new versions (after all, they may want to, and it shows that they made the right decisions way back when)