[ILUG] virtualisation on linux

[David De La Harpe Golden]

daithí wrote:

> 
> the other alternative i've been looking at is Xen, of course, which looks
> quite decent. i prefer the idea of full virtualisation, as opposed to para-,
> but i'm not sure how zen operates.
>

xen "hvm" uses hardware virtualization.

kvm is a non-xen solution that uses hardware virtualization, building
on qemu (xen hvm also reuses stuff qemu in fact, but kvm
feels like qemu down to the command line options, it just runs much
faster.  kvm is not to be confused with kqemu - kqemu is a helper kernel 
module which makes ordinary qemu a bit faster).

kvm is IMO rather simpler and easier to use compared to xen (virtual 
machines are augmented linux processes and are managed by linux not some 
strange kernel underneath, you just use normal linux command line tools 
on them), but makes no attempt to support older systems without hardware 
virtualization support.

Contrary to certain FUD, kvm supports migration nowadays.
http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/Migration