Re: [Xen-users] XEN future....? RESEARCH :- Do participate.....

["Henning Sprang" <henning_sprang@xxxxxx>]

On 2/7/07, Petersson, Mats <Mats.Petersson@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 1.) Good performance
> > 2.) Free of cost
Free of license cost doesn't mean free of admistration costs! Don't forget that.

> > Cons:-
> > 1.) Doesnt support all hardware like USB and all...
>
> Where do you mean that USB isn't supported? USB in the guest isn't
> really meaningfull unless you also describe WHAT you want to do with USB
> in the guest - for example USB-sticks can be exported to the guest from
> Dom0 using "xm block-attach", whilst attaching a new keyboard is pretty
> meaningless to the guest, as the keyboard is going via Dom0 anyways.
All these things really depend heavily on what usage scenarios one looks at.

On the desktop, I want just about any usb device to be easily usable
in my windows hvm domain.
(admittedly, "I" is hardly right, but "the users I installed linux
with a hvm domain to resort to when things don't work on linux, e.g.
because of missing drivers or apps").

The xen manual says, exporting usb devices is possible, but yet no one
anwered my questions if this information is really up to date. (and I
had no time to waste on another unimplemented/beta feature)

> > 2.) Linux drivers are generally 3-4 months behind windows, so any new
> > feature can not be implemented immidiately...
This is a generic linux problem which I'm not going to dicsuss here.

> > 3.) Not stable enough, lot of complexities...
>
> The stable releases seem reasonably stable, but of course, it does
> depend on which features you use, and what you're trying to do.
Right.

> It's certainly complex, that's for sure, because virtualization is a
> complex matter...
That a software is complex on the inside, doesn't necessarily mean it
must be complex and hard to get going on the user/admin side. Again,
when looking at the desktop, the latter is a heavy con. For admins,
some things might be more bearable than for plain users, because
things get cheaper the more machines you have to administrate (in case
some of the complex admin tasks scale well, and are not proportional
to the number of machines).

Look at qemu, vmware-workstation or player - even with kvm which is
very new, you can get to a hvm domU in minutes.

With Xen you have a lot of things to go through and a lot of
configuration to understand.
Some GUI tools of mainstream distributions make that a bit better, but
some of them only try, and actually make it worse because they just
don't work, are slow, crash too often.
As of now, at least. Sure and hopefully, this will change...

I'll stil stick with Xen, but it's interesting to look at these things
from a criticall perspective... that show rooms to improve.
Henning

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