Posted by Fraser Campbell
Wed, 16 Aug 2006 12:16:00 GMT
Steve Kemp announced xen-shell on Freshmeat yesterday.
The project claims to be …
a simple console program to allow a hosting company to delegate control of Xen instances directly to their clients. The shell allows a user to boot, shutdown, or reimage their own personal Xen guest without giving the user general access to the Xen host system or allowing the user to touch the instances of other users.
This sounds useful not only for hosting companies but also for “enterprisey” places where the Xen guests and Xen hosts may not be controlled by the same systems administrators.
Steve is a well known Debian hacker and has been churning out Xen tools for some time, I trust that his tool is already useful and that it will improve over time.
See Steve’s page A console interface to manage a xen instance or Freshmeat’s Project details for xen-shell.
Posted in Xen | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 11 Aug 2006 12:56:00 GMT
ZDNet has an article today with some responses from Novell CTO Markus Rex refuting Red Hat’s claim that Xen is not enterprise ready. Says Rex:
“We had all the major hardware partners that had virtualisation hardware like IBM, Intel and AMD. They all stood up and said ‘Yes, this technology’s ready, and we fully support deployments based on Xen and in combination with SUSE Linux Enterprise 10’.”
Read full article here.
Posted in Xen, Novell / SuSE | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 04 Aug 2006 19:11:00 GMT
I have posted a question to the Xen-devel list to see if there are any known fixes for my issue with b44 network driver. I’m not holding out a lot of hope for an immediate solution so I decided to try something else. QEMU.
If you haven’t heard of QEMU it is an open-source processor emulator, QEMU is also part of the technology used by Xen in order to boot unmodified guests. You can get more information on the QEMU website at http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/.
Read more...
Posted in Xen, Ubuntu, QEMU | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 04 Aug 2006 03:25:00 GMT
For unix administrators one key to a pleasant life is having a stable and friendly workstation from which to launch scripts, X clients, test/debug programs, etc. As an added bonus that workstation should be portable so that you can hack whether you are at the office, in a train or on the beach sipping your beverage of choice.
As a Linux administrator for over 10 years my choice of workstation is a Linux desktop. However, running the Linux desktop in some environments can be challenging as there are many vendors who force the use of their tools to the exclusion of others.
Among the numerous barriers I have encountered are:
- Microsoft Exchange/Outlook combination
- Microsoft Visio
- spreadsheets which think they are applications (macros)
- Lotus Notes
- websites that don’t function on anything but Internet Explorer
Cutting the story short, Microsoft Windows is a necessary evil for most unix administrators unless they have the fortune of working for small highly-focused technical companies.
For the past year my goal has been to run Windows as a guest on a Xen enabled laptop – avoiding hacks such as Citrix and Terminal Server.
Thanks to the common availability of Intel VT extensions there is now a good chance that this can be done. What follows is my account of how I did it …
Read more...
Posted in Xen, Ubuntu | 2 comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Thu, 03 Aug 2006 15:34:00 GMT
There have been quite a number of articles related to Xen and Xensource recently. I wasn’t going to bother posting about them but since I was quite amused I thought it might be worthwhile …
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Posted in Xen | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Mon, 31 Jul 2006 23:17:00 GMT
XenSource has placed their recent OLS presentation slides online for all to see.
If interested go to http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/netos/papers/2006-xen-ols.pdf.
Posted in Xen | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 21 Jul 2006 13:12:00 GMT
The Register has to be one of my favorite web sites, yesterday they published their take on the Microsoft/Xensource agreement. I do like the following quote:
If Linux is full-blown cancer, then Xen has to be the equivalent of a colon polyp.
The premise of the article is that the Microsoft / Xensource agreement is just a means for Microsoft to hype Xen and hence detract from VMware. I would have to agree. Does Microsoft really care about Linux suddenly, I doubt it …
So what does Xensource get from this agreement? That is not entirely clear. I would hope there is more in this for Xensource than cheap publicity and hype.
My guess is that there must be some behind the scenes agreements about Microsoft assisting Xensource with providing a paravirtualized Longhorn or at least providing assistance with the creation of paravirtualized drivers to let Windows run more quickly on Xen/HVM.
Read Register article here.
Posted in Xen, Microsoft Virtual Server | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Fri, 21 Jul 2006 03:30:00 GMT
Today at OLS Ian Pratt presented “Xen 3.1 and the Art of Virtualization”. To me the entire talk seemed like a bit of a sales pitch compared to most of the OLS talks but it was still interesting and some new bits emerged.
Read more...
Posted in Xen | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Thu, 20 Jul 2006 22:54:00 GMT
Today there were several presentations related to virtualization, first came Zachary Amsden presenting VMware’s VMI work.
Zach’s presentation was very technical and informative. Differences between traditional (full) virtualization and paravirtualization were discussed, some highly technical discussions followed and finally benchmarks were displayed.
Read more...
Posted in Xen, VMware | no comments
Posted by Fraser Campbell
Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:33:00 GMT
Xensource and Microsoft have announced that they will cooperate in developing the capability for Microsoft’s Longhorn virtualization solution to run Xen enabled guests.
This should be a good fit for customers who are mostly Windows shops but see some need for Linux. Paravirtualized Linux on Windows Server, hmmm …
See full press release here.
Posted in Xen, Microsoft Virtual Server | no comments
