Morning Discussion

From The Chatty
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    December 1, 2009 6:15 AM

    REPOST FOR MR:
    Virtualbox is up to version 3.1, sports a 30% speed increase and now supports live migration!

    http://virtualbox.org/

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      December 1, 2009 6:18 AM

      wow nice, thanks. you're useful today.

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      December 1, 2009 6:18 AM

      Can you put a bee farm in it?

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      December 1, 2009 6:19 AM

      Microsoft: Where would you like to go today
      VirtualBox: Where the hell are you going, decide, motherfucker!

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        December 1, 2009 7:52 AM

        VirtualPC does one thing really well, in my opinion: runs Windows. If you want Linux or anything else then yeah go VirtualBox, but if all you want to do is test against Windows on a program which doesn't install a ton of shit then VirtualPC works great.

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      December 1, 2009 6:23 AM

      Also, VMWare Player 3.0 is free, supports hardware virtualization and all that jazz. Now can create VMs from scratch and manage a library of them. Support for Aero in Windows Vista and 7.

      Does not have support for snapshots or live migration, however.

      http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

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        December 1, 2009 6:27 AM

        Yeah, I'm sticking with VMWare. They've never let me down, and I've never even used a product you have to pay for. VMWare Server has done the trick for me.

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          December 1, 2009 6:40 AM

          Server works well if you want ... a server ... the actual user console portion of it is pretty damn slow and doesn't support 3d acceleration. Which is cool if that's what you need. If you're just running server on a computer and then remoting in to the server using remote desktop or something.

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            December 1, 2009 6:47 AM

            You can run a "headless" VM instance in vbox, and either RDP into it, or connect via ssh or whatever as you would with a true headless server

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        December 1, 2009 6:42 AM

        Is there a VMWare product for windows that does what virtual pc does in Win7 / VMware on OSX does in cutting windows out of the OS? I can't remember the name of that but that shit would be handy.

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        December 1, 2009 6:46 AM

        I've been using VMware workstation for the past 2-3 years & I believe it's losing ground. It was leaps & bounds better than virtual PC back in the day, but now, I'm not quite sure. . .especially with virtualbox out & about.

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      December 1, 2009 6:26 AM

      I wish VirtualBox would get a real fucking update feature, not just a link to an EXE that I have to DL and then install over while it fucks my network connections up.

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      December 1, 2009 6:36 AM

      have they added dragon drop support yet?

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      December 1, 2009 6:38 AM

      [deleted]

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        December 1, 2009 6:45 AM

        I never had a problem getting shared folders working with vbox

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        December 1, 2009 6:52 AM

        VMWare doesn't have shit on Xen. Srsly. Ask themelon. I am now a Xen convert thanks to him.

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          December 1, 2009 7:43 AM

          what do you think about kvm

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          December 1, 2009 7:53 AM

          I <3 Xenserver

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          December 1, 2009 8:45 AM

          Xen requires a CPU with hardware virtualization, is that right?

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            December 1, 2009 8:46 AM

            Yeah. Otherwise you are stuck with hardware virt. A lot more resources.

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          December 1, 2009 8:51 AM

          Isn't Ubuntu trying to drop Xen for some other virtualization setup?

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            December 1, 2009 8:53 AM

            I think I'm mistaken here.

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              December 1, 2009 8:55 AM

              No you are correct, they are moving to KVM in the long term.

              http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9867657-39.html

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                December 1, 2009 9:00 AM

                Never used KVM, but I'm not a big fan of the Host/Guest model because of the performance.

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                  December 1, 2009 9:40 AM

                  But the performance is supposed to be extremely similar for KVM vs. Xen, with the caveat that KVM will only run on processors which have virtualization extensions (all modern processors)

                  I found this from 2008: http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/XenVsKVM

                  and keep in mind that KVM is growing in leaps and bounds since most linux vendors agree it is the Way Forward.. you should look again, things have probably changed alot since you last evaluated them

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                    December 1, 2009 10:14 AM

                    attn rydogg1

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                      December 1, 2009 10:18 AM

                      yeah I saw it, was also reading their documentation. It's benchmarks are interesting for sure. I may play around with this stuff internally, but I don't have another server and yet another Virt product to introduce.

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                        December 1, 2009 10:20 AM

                        Keep in mind kvm's boon and curse is that it's in rapid development mode.. look at the bleeding edge version vs. the one that's distributed in redhat.. I don't know how much you want to trust the latest and greatest version in say a prod environment just yet

                        but KVM is going to supplant xen imho

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                          December 1, 2009 10:41 AM

                          Xen was there at one point before Citrix made it more household along with Red Hat at the Enterprise level.

                          Again I'm sure it's a fine product, it looks like simple product to work with and in terms of Virt you definitely want to deploy as quickly as possible. Being able to turn around a full server in less than 20-30 mins is a goal and probably with a few shell script you could do it as easily as you can with Xen.

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                    December 1, 2009 10:16 AM

                    Ok, this matches up with what I heard. Ars was speculating that they need a few years of work on KVM to get things settled, but right now it's like the up-and-comer.

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          December 1, 2009 8:51 AM

          Can Xen use VMware images? Or is there an easy way to convert them? I've got a spare blade kicking about and it'd be interesting to check this out. Does it have anything similar to VMotion for live migration of VMs?

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            December 1, 2009 8:58 AM

            I did some research on this but it was really difficult, course that was over a year ago. That was one of the hardest parts in the conversion was that I had to rebuild some of my servers from scratch.

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          December 1, 2009 10:22 AM

          I'm going to run Xen on my Mac Mini as soon as an updated version supports the NIC ootb. The current method is to download via USB and compile -- I'm simply that lazy.

          Optionally, the newer Dell Zino boxes will eventually come real cheap, have 2x cores and 4GB of ram!

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      December 1, 2009 7:42 AM

      virtualbox managed to boot a hard drive image that vmware told me was corrupt, saved my day, I love it for that

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      December 1, 2009 7:49 AM

      What is virtual box? Is it like parallels, where i can run it on my macbook and run windows at the same time?

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        December 1, 2009 7:53 AM

        Type-2 Hypervisor

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        December 1, 2009 7:54 AM

        Yep it creates a 'virtual machine' which you can install whatever O/S on.. the O/S believes its being installed on an actual hard drive, motherboard, video card, etc but they are virtual services provided by the VM framework... you can install pretty much any o/s that'll run on an x86 machine

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      December 1, 2009 7:50 AM

      # Experimental support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface; see the manual for more information)

      will it boot a unmodified MacOS DVD? :)

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      December 1, 2009 8:51 AM

      Is there a good resource for ready-made VMs to load up? I really don't want to go through the process of installing an OS and all the apps I'd want (like a LAMP stack for example)

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