On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 21:21 +0100, Brian Chivers wrote:
> I'm starting to look at virtualisation but I know very little about it.
> I've read a bit about Xen & KVM and have had several companies visit
> College drumming on about VMWare (very expensive but nice features) & M$
> HyperV(quite cheap for education). I would really like to stay open
> source but I need to read more about this as it'll be for "business
> critical" systems so stability, flexibility and easy management will be
> very important.
Have you looked at VMware Server? It is free and can be upgraded at a
later date to the ESX Server if you want a commercial, supported version
though as you say it is rather expensive.
I have been using Server at home for quite a couple of years at least.
Right now I am running 2.0 on an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS box. As clients I am
running Win 98, NT4, 2K and XP and also OpenBSD.
I did also try Sun's Virtual Box but the Open Source version does not
(or at least did not at that time) support remote management, the
commercial version does. Kind of a killer for me since I am running my
VMs on a headless server. It could be configured via command line though
but VMware's remote console is just so much easier.
I have not really tried any other VM systems. Keep meaning to try KVM,
probably will eventually since I know we have some customers who want to
use it.
As for books I am afraid I have not read any. Not seen the need as yet,
which is unusual because usually the first thing I do before trying
anything is buy a book!
Rich
--
http://radanter.deviantart.com/
