Re: [Xen-users] virtualbox vs. xen - ease of domU installation

["Grant McWilliams" <grantmasterflash@xxxxxxxxx>]

Although you still have to be booted into a Xenified kernel, the virt-manager app developed primarily by RedHat and shipped in Fedora, RHEL and CentOS makes installing Xen guests (all HVM guests, and Redhat-like PV guests) similarly friendly.  They were also working on support for Suse PV guests, although I don't know if that came to anything.

Setting up Xen does lack some of the simplicity of being able to install something that acts more like a "normal application", though.

Cheers,
Mark

 

It's not that good. At last look, it has *no* support for  configuring floppy or CD access at install time, no support for multiple virtual or physical disks, and no support for using using a Dom0 installed kernel in a DomU, as has been supported in Xen since its creation. It needs quite a lot of work, and the version in RHEL always lags significantly behind that of Fedora. Virt-manager is little better, and does not allow modification of a guest domain without shutting it down, which Xen itself *DOES* allow with the xm command.

I hope many of these issues have been addressed in FC9, but these sorts of issues are why I'm hoping for someone good with Perl to do a decent Webmin utility.

I agree, virt-manager is just barely good enough to use as an interface to start and stop your domains. I never use it to actually create anything. The interface that SUSE has is better. 

Considering you can do just about anything with the xm command a shell script with a select menu would do a better job! Well, outside of monitoring your domains. I actually made a wizard that installed CentOS from premade kickstart file and web access because I needed to test many different configurations without me having to install. It was just a couple hundred line bash script but worked fairly well. I think virt-manager will get better in the future but I wouldn't look to Fedora 9 for it because it can't even act as a Dom0 so there's probably not much use in having an updated virt-manager in it.

Grant

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users