Xen, QEMU/KVM or Vmware ?

[John Lagrue]

On 22/08/07, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> John Lagrue wrote:
> > Being quite keen on the concept of virtualisation, I find myself in a
> > bit of a quandary with F7.
> >
> > Being one who needs an uptodate kernel (my laptop power does funny
> > things with older ones) I can't run Xen because the kernels are too
> > old. Therefore I have QEMU/KVM or Vmware.
> >
> > Though the F7 documents talk lightly about QEMU being all part of the
> > Virtual Machine Manager, it isn't really; the resulting systems are
> > slow, refuse to boot off valid ISO images and have no configuration
> > options for networking. They don't even use the system CDROM until you
> > specifically add it after the virtual machine is built. So I use
> > qemu-kvm on the command line; not that the Fedora documents mention
> > that option - thank heaven for Google!
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Fedora7VirtQuickStart is referenced
> from the docs site.
>
> libvirt and associated tools like virsh and virt-manager provide a
> neutral interface to all underlying VM technologies they support
> including Qemu, KVM and Xen.
>
> Rahul

They *say* they do, but in actual fact they don't work very well at all.

Try running virsh without Xen and all you get is "error: no valid
connection" when you try to do anything!

virt-manager works after a fashion, but gives errors galore, crashes
and a generated guest won't even boot off a valid .ISO file that
qemu-kvm had no trouble with. Even after using qemu-kvm to install the
guest, virt-manager still won't work properly. The resulting guest
won't connect to the external network, the mouse is terribly sticky,
and the manager refuses to reconnect to a running guest. All-in-all,
it's a bit of bad news if you're not running Xen.

JDL