disk partitioning for multiOS machine

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 12:49:53PM +0300, Ahmed Kamal wrote:
> > I wouldn't recommend running Windows virtualized under KVM.  There's
> > lots of random breakage, and even if you do get it working, it'll be
> > really slow.
> 
> Too bad eh, my understanding is that Xen dom0 was totally dropped off F10,
> and redhat is pushing KVM full steam.

That's not entirely true.  You should look at this page to see what's
going on:

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/XenPvopsDom0

> Why is KVM still much slower than Xen,
> and do you see that as improving soon ? I was planning on standardizing on
> KVM for all my virtulaization needs, but now I'm disappointed! Would you see
> VMware server (or vbox) as a better choice ?

KVM isn't much slower than Xen.  _Windows_ under KVM is slow if you
run it fully virtualized without any paravirt network or disk drivers
(same is also true for Windows under Xen).  You could try running
Windows with these experimental virtio drivers though which might
resolve this problem:

  http://www.linux-kvm.com/content/tip-how-setup-windows-guest-paravirtual-network-drivers
  http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=180599

(Unfortunately only a network driver seems to be available and no one
seems to be about to release any virtio disk driver for Windows).

The real problem, as ever, is Windows being closed source and not
supporting community-developed open standards such as virtio or any
one of a million other standards I could mention.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
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http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top