JDPFu.com 2025

Continued from Virtual Machine Trials – p1

• Xen
  Xen has a host, Dom0, and a client, DomU. I’ve been using Xen on my Linux hosts for about 8 months. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t load WinXP without a fairly recent x86 CPU – something within the last 2 years. At the time, I was using an Athon 1800+ for this blog and a few other services.
  Setting up Xen after installing Ubuntu 8.04 LTS “Hardy” is almost trivial. A single `apt-get install ubuntu-xen-server’ was it. Next create a small DomU for testing so you get the hang of running under Xen. Starting, stopping, checkpointing, etc.
  I like Xen. It is stable, maintainable and, in theory, you can run almost any x86 OS if you have current CPU. As with all VM technologies, RAM will probably be the first limit to your number of running VMs. Today. I’m running:
  • Hardy Dom0
    • Hardy DomU – blog
    • Hardy DomU – mail

• VMWare Server
  I used VMWare Server a few years ago on different machines in the house, a laptop and a server Linux machine.
  On the linux server, there were issues since it must attach internally to the kernel. That means you have to relink the kernel whenever the kernel or vmware server changes. At a point, that became too much of a hassle to continue.
  On the Laptop, the only issue was with performance. VMs under it were slow. The Dom0 was WinXP and the DomU was ‘DSL’ and ‘Puppy Linux’ – both distributions are designed to run on minimal hardware with very low resource requirements. Since I had performance issues, I stopped using them after a few days and uninstalled VM-Server.

• VMWare ESXi
  My experience with this host is extremely limited. VMWare announce they were making it free to use, so I registered and pulled a copy down. It is known for being an extremely tight host with minimal overhead. I don’t know. It wouldn’t install on either of my servers or on my laptop. It couldn’t find any disk drives in those machines. Free is nice, but not when your hardware isn’t supported AND doesn’t work at all.

• MS-Virtual PC
  Free. I hate MS, but with Vista this was an obvious choice for supporting VMs. I loaded it, it worked mostly, but the video performance was poor. Uninstalled.

• Sun VirtualBox
  I tried this solution about a year ago. It took a little tweaking to get the networking right and didn’t honor my laptop power settings. Basically, the DomU was always “on” which cased the fan to run 24/7. Performance was good, better than any of the other solutions. I had high hopes for this solution. After re-reading the license again, I determined it was safe to use on my laptop and installed it.
  • Vista-64 Dom0
    • WinXP DomU

It is fast – like native fast. Graphics are good enough to perform video editing. Wether running in full screen or window-ed mode, it performs very nicely. Again the networking took a little to get configured properly. The trick seems to be to use the Intel 1000 Pro network adapter. WinXP doesn’t come with a driver for this, so you need to pull it down from Intel.com. I’m running in “host” network mode. I’m very happy with VirtualBox.

See why you’d want to run your desktop in a VM in Virtual Machine Trials – p3