Advice Please: Fedora 9, Amd Phenom 9600, Nvidia GeForce 8400 & Virtualization.

[Phil Meyer]

Nat Gross wrote:
> My boss "loaned" (ahem, my job is to get Linux on it)  me a new HP Amd
> Phenom 9600 system with a GeForce 8400 video card, with Vista64 sp1
> installed.
> I want to put Fedora 9 on it (and hopefully it will be the main os it boots).
> A key requirement is to run Linux & Vista simultaneously
> (virtualization), plus if possible multiple Fedora 9 vm's.
> Running Solaris as a guest vm is in the 'it would be nice' category.
> My question is: Which virtualization technology do I use?
> Also, can I tell the KVM (or Xen or whatever) installer to run the
> Vista guest machine off the existing boot partition? (so that if and
> when we boot into Windows we should be using the same Windows as when
> it runs as a guest under Fedora 9.)
>
> Thanks in advance.
> nat
> ps. system has 6 gig of ram.
>
>   

VERY political question.  Without trying to favor one side or the other, 
this is my interpretation of the issues:

XEN
    Not in the main stream kernel, but offered in all commercial distros 
and Fedora.

KVM
    Built into the main stream kernel, but may not be as feature rich as 
XEN is currently.

The kernel maintainers favor KVM.
All commercial vendors favor XEN.

There are many technical differences between the two.  Many will point 
out that XEN is a true hypervisor, which is only true in that it 
incorporates enough of the Linux kernel to run itself, so at that level 
it is actually a level 2 hypervisor.

KVM is a level 2 hypervisor that is a hypervisor in that it does modify 
the kernel it is running on, instead of having a dedicated kernel, like 
the XEN DOM 0.

A level 1 hypervisor requires specialized hardware that typical off the 
shelf computer platforms do not have.  Larger systems have a 'card' or 
'board' that contains a dedicated SBC (single board computer) that runs 
the hypervisor.  These systems also usually feature plug and play 
hardware components which require a high level of electrical isolation 
not found on common platforms.

Having said all that, my team has been able to run 32 virtual machines 
on a system with similar specs to what you have described.  They used 
XEN to do that.

We have installed Windows (XP and Vista) as a VM for many of our 
developers.  All of those were done using KVM, and qemu-kvm.  
Performance was 'normal' with the exception of 3D graphics, which they 
did not need.

Good Luck!