[K12OSN] Software virtualization...opensource way?

[Jason Qualkenbush]

David Trask wrote:
> I'm curious to know what others may have done, experienced, or are working
> on.

Depending on what you need it for, this list might prove useful (not all 
are virtualization)

(Grabbed from http://www.cromwell-intl.com/unix/cluster.html)

     *   Xen --  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/
       Runs patched versions of Linux, BSD, maybe soon Solaris Included 
in, eg, Fedora C4, Debian, SuSE Pro 9.3, RHEL5
     * QEMU -- http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/
     * Bochs http://bochs.sourceforge.net/
     * Plex86 http://plex86.sourceforge.net/
     * User-mode Linux http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/
     * WINE http://www.winehq.org/


For what you are talking about, vmware is pretty much your best option.

I have played a lot with "usermode linux" which can run multiple -linux- 
instances.

http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/

This won't let you run windows on top of a linux box, but it does run 
different distro's on the same system.  I had Gentoo as the base system 
and ran instances of Redhat, Debian, and Slackware, all as virtual systems.

I used this more as a virtual development server, where users can go to 
a webpage, request a dev server (which launches a server of their 
choice), and then log in to do what they needed.

The most common use of this I found was for running services.  Instead 
of a chroot environment, you can run a virtual server for things like 
DNS.  You can also cluster the virtual servers so if one should fail due 
to software problems, it would fail to the other, and reboot itself 
(just restart the virtual instance).

If you have a windows box, and want to run linux on it, then try:
http://www.colinux.org/


Something I've been meaning to look more into is taking virtualization 
the other way.  I forgot what the project was called, but it looked 
great.  One way to look at virtualization is to run multiple instances 
of an operating system on a single machine.  On the other end is to run 
a single operating system across multiple machines.  So, if you have six 
servers.  You can take the processors from four of them, and build a 
virtual quad proc box.  Need more memory, just include the memory from 
the two remaining systems.  Same thing with the disks.  I wish I could 
remember what this was called.  I think it had something to do with NUMA 
at least.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Uniform_Memory_Access

-Jason