I m trying to understand the concepts in Virtualization. I guess getting my feet wet with some free ware products would be a wise move. Any pointers and suggestions on this will be appreciated
VMWare has several free products available here. Microsoft also has some free options you should check out. Just set up a virtual machine and start messing with it.
Sun's VirtualBox is an open source virtualization product, which is a great way to get started.
VirtualBox is a powerful x86 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.
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I am looking into playing around with virtualization and I was wondering if there is any software that acts as the host OS but operates much like virtual box or parallels? What I mean by this is basically is there an "OS" that more or less acts as a window manager for other virtualized desktops?
Thanks!!
Yes, Citrix XenClient does exactly what you're looking for (and they've got a free version, XenClient Express)
Unfortunately due to the nature of virtualization on "bare metal" (without an OS) the Hypervisor (the OS bit that hosts the VMs) needs to be compatible with your exact hardware.
For more information, checkout the XenClient Hardware Compatibility List. The best value machine you can get is probably the Dell Optiplex 780.
I want to clone a AIX LPAR and was wondering if the physical machine could be converted into a VM Image?
I have used the VMWare Converter to create a VM Image of a physical windows box and the documentation states that you can do that for Linux Boxes too.
http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/
I don't see information on AIX or the other UNIXes.
If creating an VM Image of an existing physical AIX box is not feasible is there any easy way to clone the AIX image to another AIX machine.
The primary intent is to avoid re-creating the setup that is already performed for the current AIX box and we want a duplicate environment with the same setup.
VMware supports x86 (and x86_64) architectures for host and guest only. IBM AIX runs on the Power architecture, and VMWare does not do architecture emulation, so what you want does not exist.
If you want to back up/clone your AIX instance to another machine, look for information regarding mksysb and AIX Sysback.
You might want to take a look at the following, but there are no guarantees, and I'm fairly certain running AIX on anything but a Power architecture is still not a reality at this time:
Qemu
PearPC
Based on further reading, i understand that VMWare does not support AIX. The guest OS can primarily be Windows, various distros of LINUX and Mac-OSX. I also see Solaris as a supported guest OS, but i don't see AIX. So i don't think this is possible.
I would have to look at the Virtualization features supported from IBM for this activity.
Thanks,
Manglu
I'm planning to build Linux web development server in virtual machine environment on Windows Virtual PC. As I don't have much experience with installing and configuring Linux web servers, I wanted to ask for some advice:
What Linux distribution do you recommend for such server? I want the virtual server to look like real hosting environment.
Do any pre-configured virtual machines for web development exist out there?
Maybe some instruction and tips on configuring?
My requirements for the server are quite standard: latest versions of Apache, MySQL, PHP, probably Python and Postgre.
Thank you.
UPDATE: OK I think I'll go with Ubuntu Server for this.
You can probably go with Ubuntu. It is easy for a beginner and there is plently of documentation on how to install a LAMP stack and later you can move on to other distros.
If you are looking for pre-configured machines, then you can have a look at VMWare Appliances
For the distribution I would recommend Ubuntu - you can add all the server software you want from their repositories.
For a virtual machine I'd recommend Ubuntu Server Edition JeOS, as that won't have any un-needed software on it.
Debian Lenny - rock solid stability & the most package support
I'm sure you can find some
Use prefork-worker apache, MySQL 5/PHP 5, Postgres 8.4.
There are lots of prebuilt vmware images that you can use. You might also consider looking at something like Amazon EC2 for which there are lots of off the shelf images.
I would also suggest Ubuntu server as a base OS.
Incidentally there are other virtualisation options in case Virtual PC doesn't recognise those prebuilt image formats (I think those formats are more standardised and interoperable these days, but not sure)...e.g. there is vmware, and there is virtualbox.org
Does it need to be in Linux straight away? You can run (Apache et al) XAMPP locally and get it up and running in 5 minutes.
I'm reading an article about Xen, a virtual machine monitor. They say that an operating system requires some modification in order to be able to act as a guest OS on top of Xen. Now, for an OS like Linux, I can understand what a "modification" might mean but in the case of an OS like say, Windows XP, what does it mean? I mean, XP is closed source proprietary OS right?
It means exactly the same thing. It's just harder because the source is not widely available. Note that the modifications are no longer required when Xen is used in conjunction with hardware virtualization.
Xen was originally a university project. As a researcher (or as a government agency tasked with infrastructure security), you can get the Windows sourcecode from Microsoft. You're just not allowed to distribute your own version of Windows.
This is exactly what they did: they had the sourcecode of Windows XP and then they ported XP to Xen, just to show that if Microsoft were ever to officially support Xen, it would be doable.
On the other hand, although para-virtualization cannot provide an end-to-end virtualization solution, it can improve performance.
I am using VMware Server 1.0.7 on Windows XP SP3 at the moment to test software in virtual machines.
I have also tried Microsoft Virtual PC (do not remeber the version, could be 2004 or 2007) and VMware was way faster at the time.
I have heard of Parallels and VirtualBox but I did not have the time to try them out. Anybody has some benchmarks how fast is each of them (or some other)?
I searched for benchmarks on the web, but found nothing useful.
I am looking primarily for free software, but if it is really better than free ones I would pay for it.
Also, if you are using (or know of) a good virtualization software but have no benchmarks for it, please let me know.
From my experience of Parallels and VMware (on the PC and more extensively on the Mac) the difference between any 2 competing versions of the software is usually quite small and often 'reversed' in the next releases.
I never found Parallels to be much faster (or slower) than VMware - it often would be a case of the state of the VM I was running, the host machine itself and the app(s) I was running within the VM. If VMWare brought out a new release which did something faster, you could be sure that Parallels would improve their performance in that area in the next release, too.
In the end I settled on VMWare Fusion and the key reason for this was just that it played nicely with VMware Workstation on the PC. I have trouble taking Parallels VMs from the Mac to the PC and back again, and this worked fine on VMware. Finally, though this is less of a concern, I was unhappy that sometimes it felt as if Parallels would release a version without proper regression testing - you'd get the up-to-date version and find that networking was suddenly unexplicably broken until they released another patch a few days later. I doubt this is still the case but VMware always felt a little more 'in control' and professional to me.
I'd go for a solution that you can get running in a stable fashion on your PC, that is compatible with your other requirements (such as your co-workers' platforms and your overall budget). You can waste your lifetime trying to measure which one is faster at any given task!
One other thing - it's worth checking the documentation that comes with the software, and any forums etc, before making judgements about performance. For instance, in my experience throwing huge amounts of ram at your VM (at the expense of free ram in the host system) does NOT automatically make it faster; better to split the ram up evenly, and certainly keep an eye on any recommended figure. In VMware, that recommended figure is a good guide.
You'll get best performance if your hardware supports hardware virtualization, such as AMD's AMD-V or Intel's VT, and you enable this feature on the computer and in your virtualization software.
For Microsoft solutions, you need at least Virtual PC 2007 or Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, or Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 (I don't expect you'll rebuild your system just to run Hyper-V, but I thought I'd mention it).
Subjectively I haven't noticed any difference between Virtual PC and VMware Workstation performance; I'm using VMware now as it supports USB virtualization, which Virtual PC doesn't.
You also generally need to install appropriate custom, virtualization-aware, drivers in the guest OS, as the standard drivers are expecting to talk to real hardware. In Virtual PC and Server these are called Additions, in VMware they are VMware Tools.
Anandtech has some great info on virtualization. Although they are not any benchmarks, it provides a great insight on why it is so difficult to do proper virtualization benchmarks. I cannot suggest you a specific product, because it depends very much on your requirements.