Hi All,
recently Stuart and I came up with idea to consolidate development of all Virtualization systems in Gentoo.
Virtualization is a framework or methodology of dividing the resources of a computer into multiple execution environments. Virtualization techniques create multiple isolated partitions (Virtual Machines (VM) or Virtual Private Servers (VPS)) on a single physical server. There are several kinds of virtualization techniques which provide similar features but differ in the degree of abstraction and the methods used for virtualization.
First technique: Virtual Machines (e.g. VMWare, MS VirtualPC)
Second technique: Para-Virtualized Machines (e.g. UML, Xen)
Third technique: Virtualization on the OS Level (e.g. Linux-VServer, OpenVZ aka Virtuozzo)
A more detailed comparision can be found at [1].
We’d like to encourage everyone who is interested in Virtualization development in Gentoo to join #gentoo-vps (or reply to the list) and participate in the planning of this effort.
Cheers!
[1] http://openvz.org/documentation/tech/virtualization
For me VM sarts and ends with QEmu. It’s free and open source so I either don’t have to buy vmware or keep opening a new hotmail acount every month for a new key.
As for QEmu, with the kqemu accelerator it’s quite decently fast. I’m slowly building an OS Farm with it (a collection of OSs installed in emulation http://www.mindstab.net/wiki/index.php/OS_Farm). By default networking works fine enough for browsing, but with some tun device and bridging work you can get it doing everything (starcraft on win98 in linux at a lan party)
So Qemu has been very useful to me on several fronts both play and experimentation/learning. I honeslty don;t see why people don’t pour more attention into it but I’m not really a hard core VM guy so there may be some limitations it has I haven’t run into.
I would be interested to hear those just for knowing stuff’s sake 😉
Thanks