[SLL] To Xen or not to Xen

[Adam Monsen]

On 9/10/07, johnbaxterlists at mac.com <johnbaxterlists at mac.com> wrote:
[...]
> Roughly speaking, from top to bottom, they take longer and teach
> more.  ;-)

I concur.

I had a long, furious battle with Xen during mid-2006 and concluded
that I really didn't like it at all. That's my advice in a nutshell:
don't use Xen. Maybe it is easier to use these days, who knows.

Xen was (is?):
* hard to set up
* hard to automate
* finicky; prone to crashes
* not part of the upstream kernel

Xen:
* requires special hardware for fully-virtualized VMs
* takes for fricking ever to compile

Some more thoughts on Xen: http://adammonsen.com/?s=xen

Chroot jails (one per service) are really cool, much simpler to
implement, and fast as heck. jailkit is helpful in setting up and
maintaining jails. I keep hearing that FreeBSD jails are cooler than
chroot jails, but I've never tried 'em.

Heck, even SELinux sounds like it would do the job and would be more
fun to use/maintain than Xen for what you describe. If you really
really want to use VMs, OpenVZ/Virtuozza both sound interesting. If
you're like me and prefer Free Software, QEMU is nice; it has suited
me fine for my VM needs. Works like a charm. Fedora 7 even offers the
super nifty "virt-manager" GUI tool for getting your first VM started
and doing some simple management tasks. I believe there's also a
command line tool for VM management. And if you switch VM engines,
libvirt might support whatever you switch to.

-- 
Adam Monsen