[OpenIndiana-discuss] XEN and Crossbow

[Dominik Sadowski]

  I recenty asked same question at Openindiana Wiki / Openindiana 
Releases / ... / OpenIndiana oi_147 - What's New
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/OpenIndiana+oi_147+-+What%27s+New

and also at Illumos Project forum:
http://illumos.org/boards/1/topics/476

Looks like Oracle will drop xVM from theirs next Solaris release 
(probably because Oracle bet on own hypervisor - Oracle VM,
if I recall it is linux based XEN - too bad).
And if things goes that way it will be not politically correct (from 
binary compatibility point of view) to include xVM in OpenIndiana.
It's a shame because as I and also many others discovered that "Crosbow 
+ xVM (XEN) + ZFS  (better external ZFS based storage for VMs) is a 
killer feature combo".


 From what I gather from IRC/mailing lists/blogs it's not an easy taks 
to maintain xVM dom0 code in kernel (and also throughly test that), not 
mentioning updating that to XEN 4.0 compatible.
There were also some proposals for creating xVM revital project at 
Illumos site (specially targeted towards linux XEN devs - after KVM is 
gaining more attraction on Linux), but it's looks like they didn't get 
any interest.

Missing dom0 (xVM/XEN) support in OpenIndiana is one thing, but worse is 
that it can't be run as PV guest in XEN(xVM) = PV domU (as others said - 
I haven't tried that myself - so I can't confirm that. BTW is this 
TRUE?, does OpenIndiana contain xVM/XEN compatible PV Kernel?)


On 2010-09-24 08:34, Jeppe Toustrup wrote:
> 2010/9/24<hojnik at virtualizing.org>:
>> I have heard they is currently no XEN (xVM Server) and Crossbow inside.
>
> Crossbow is definitely included, I don't know about Xen since I don't
> use it. (Who needs Xen when you got zones? :)
People need Xen in order to run various Linux distros and Windowzes 
(best if they can be PV / pv enabled with i/o + net drivers) on same 
hardware next to Solaris based hosts. For zones - I'm going to try and 
use them. I'm rather completely convinced that I'll deploy production 
servers inside zones (java app servers + db servers and so on), but I'm 
also planning to put that in separate PV domU system on xVM hypervisor - 
so I coud easilly move such complete zones enabled (running) VM machine 
to another physical server (using xVM "live migration" for eg.).

>
> --
> Venlig hilsen / Kind regards
> Jeppe Toustrup
>
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