On Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:01:16 +0100
Rik <hlug090104@???> wrote:
>
> 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.
> >
> > Can anyone recommend a good book / books for me to start me down
> > this road :-)
> >
> > Thanks
> > Brian
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > The views expressed here are my own and not necessarily
> >
> > the views of Portsmouth College
> >
> Take a look at Sun's VirtualBox. I cannot sing it's praises enough.
> Last year we set it up with a couple of instances of server 2003
> acting as Domain Controllers. The Host OS is Ubuntu with 3 NIC's, 2
> are bound to the Virtual 2003 servers. Ironically we are now using it
> in production as it's so stable. There are only 40 of us so I can't
> say how it would cope with lots of users. That said, the company
> website is load balanced onto IIS running on it and that has been
> faultless too (the caveats being the usual Microsoft type issues -
> not the VB itself). It's worth a gold star and I can't shake a stick
> at it.
>
> VMWare is expensive, XEN is very good if you want to spend time
> learning it. VirtualBox you can have running in the time it takes to
> fry an egg. My plan was to cut my teeth on VB and move to XEN. So far
> no need.
VirtualBox _is_ very easy to use. I have just installed the Sun* version
and got XP-Pro running in about half an hour. It helped that I already
had an XP.iso on my hard drive.
*Sun version 'cos I've had module-mismatch errors trying to use the
Debian sid version. Everytime there is a kernel update (a fairly
frequent occurrence with sid) I'd get errors next time I tried to
start XP.
I tried rebuilding the modules but to no avail so when a message popped
up saying Sun had an upgrade available to download I went for it.
VirtualBox is now installed in /opt which is not the 'Debian Way' of
doing things and I don't get VirtualBox as a applications option in the
windowmaker menu but that is easily solvable. It looks like it is
easily un-installable too.
--
John Lewis
using Debian Sid with windowmaker for a nicer desktop
