Amen to that! IMHO, vmware merely pays lip service to Linux. 12 years
ago, when we were using Linux on the job, we (and many, many others)
were asking for a Linux client. We are now at VSphere 4, and still only
windows clients.
VMware server is even worse. It runs on Linux, and it worked okay, but
you are frozen in time -- no updates -- lest you break your install. I
did that on my vmware server installation, and then I upgraded. I could
not get the vmware modules to compile on a reasonably modern kernel. So
I went back to an earlier kernel (2.6.30, iirc), and once I got the
modules compiled, the web interface only worked about one time in 3. So
I am pretty much done with vmware.
Now, since I only have 32 bit machines, I guess I'll be doing Xen, since
as good as it is, VBox is good for desktop-type virtualization, rather
than machine consolidation. Even with it's vboxheadless functionality,
its still a bit too dodgy for a group of machines that need to stay up.
--b
On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 3:20 PM, Hugo Vanwoerkom <hvw59601@care2.com
<mailto:hvw59601@care2.com>> wrote:
Mark Allums wrote:
On 4/23/2010 11:31 AM, Richard Lawrence wrote:
Hi all,
P.S. Apologies if this question seems too far off-topic for
debian-user. If there's a better place to ask this
question, I'd like
to know that, too.
Virtualbox meets more of your individual criteria than anything
else I can think of, but the open source edition lacks USB. I
would consider the non-OSE version for now, but only if I were
prepared to migrate to something else, later, depending on what
Oracle may choose to to with it, now that they own Sun.
Some version of QEMU with KVM will always work, but you
definitely need the KVM bits, because by itself QEMU is not a
speed demon.
I enjoy Xen-like hypervisors from an aesthetics point-of-view,
but the best ones are not free in any sense. Microsoft's
Hyper-V flat-out costs money, and VMware's ESXi comes with too
much baggage. Xen itself is still in a state of flux, and
though the 2.6.32 kernel version is much more stable than
previous versions, I wouldn't call it ready for prime time.
And I am getting tired of always having to look around for fixes to
VMware's server whenever you upgrade your kernel, it appears their
Linux attention leaves something to be desired.