librelist archives

Re: VMs

From:

yeswanth swami

Date:

2011-06-06 @ 04:40

Hi,

Yesterday , I had a discussion with marmoute . It brought me more clarity
over choosing a suitable VM for PyTI.
I now prefer KVM over Qemu for the following reasons :

1) Qemu in normal mode is very slow .
2) Though in  accelerated mode (kqemu) it has decent performance, kqemu is
no longer developed or supported (Qemu also dropped support for kqemu)
3) KVM is relatively fast compared to other vms discussed .



On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 5:33 PM, yeswanth swami <swamiyeswanth@gmail.com>wrote:

> For PyTI
>
> Our Virtualization requirements are :
> 1) Supported by libvirt
> 2) Has to be an open source tool with an active community
> 3) Can isolate from the host comupter with good security
>
>
> Now libvirt supports the following foss tools
> 1) Xen
>     i) It requires changes to be made in the operating system for the
> virtualization to happen . So  supported for linux
>        operating system(as source code is open) but not for proprietary
> operating systems.
>     ii) ALso Xen requires changes with kernel, so we cant use linux distro
> kernel directly.
>
> 2) Qemu(emulation)
>     i) It can be used without touching "the hosts hard drive" or invoking
> special administrator priviledges . Supports suspend/resume
>     ii) There are multiple layers of support for qemu driver in libvirt
> (one of which "qemu:///session" will have the same priviledges as the client
> application , which can cater PyTI)
>     iii) It is usually slow in normal mode.  Accelerated mode needs writing
> to the hosts hard drive (can be a problem for PyTI). Suspend/Resume is also
> slow
>
> 3) KVM(fullvirtualization)
>     i) It turns linux kernel into a hyperviser using a kernel module.
>     ii) So it allows other operating system to run in the user space of the
> host Linux system.
>     iii) The guest operating system interfaces to the KVM
>     iv)No support for other operating systems
>
> 4) VirtualBox(fullvirtualization)
>     i)Fast , suspend/resume work well
>     ii)All platforms support . Popular
>     iii) Resource hogging
>
> IMO qemu or VirtualBox should serve our purpose. (with a preference to
> VirtualBox coz I used it before ^ ^)
>
> I need help on how to go about implementation of vms.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Cheers,
> Yeswanth
>
>


-- 
Cheers,
Yeswanth

Hi back,

> Yesterday , I had a discussion with marmoute . It brought me more clarity
> over choosing a suitable VM for PyTI.
> I now prefer KVM over Qemu for the following reasons :
>
> 1) Qemu in normal mode is very slow .
> 2) Though in  accelerated mode (kqemu) it has decent performance, kqemu is
> no longer developed or supported (Qemu also dropped support for kqemu)
> 3) KVM is relatively fast compared to other vms discussed .

And what about Virtualbox then ? It could be an interesting solution as 
it supports other OSes than linux based ones.
-- 
Alexis

On Thu, Jun 09, 2011 at 05:53:42PM +0200, Alexis Métaireau wrote:
> Hi back,
> 
> > Yesterday , I had a discussion with marmoute . It brought me more clarity
> > over choosing a suitable VM for PyTI.
> > I now prefer KVM over Qemu for the following reasons :
> >
> > 1) Qemu in normal mode is very slow .
> > 2) Though in  accelerated mode (kqemu) it has decent performance, kqemu is
> > no longer developed or supported (Qemu also dropped support for kqemu)
> > 3) KVM is relatively fast compared to other vms discussed .
> 
> And what about Virtualbox then ? It could be an interesting solution as 
> it supports other OSes than linux based ones.

please see the last yeswanth email with a nice table to compare solution.

I added to addition question via jabber:

You lack a "security" raw in your table.
What are the Oracle view about virtualbox ? (given all issue freesoftware 
have with former sun project ?)

-- 
Pierre-Yves