[Devel] Re: [RFC] Virtualization steps

[Bill Davidsen]

Sam Vilain wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 09:41 -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote:
>>> It is more than realistic. Hosting companies run more than 100 VPSs in 
>>> reality. There are also other usefull scenarios. For example, I know 
>>> the universities which run VPS for every faculty web site, for every 
>>> department, mail server and so on. Why do you think they want to run 
>>> only 5VMs on one machine? Much more! 
>> I made no commont on what "they" might want, I want to make the rack of 
>> underutilized Windows, BSD and Solaris servers go away. An approach 
>> which doesn't support unmodified guest installs doesn't solve any of my 
>> current problems. I didn't say it was in any way not useful, just not of 
>> interest to me. What needs I have for Linux environments are answered by 
>> jails and/or UML.
> 
> We are talking about adding jail technology, also known as containers on
> Solaris and vserver/openvz on Linux, to the mainline kernel.
> 
> So, you are obviously interested!
> 
> Because of course, you can take an unmodified filesystem of the guest
> and assuming the kernels are compatible run them without changes.  I
> find this consolidation approach indispensible.
> 
The only way to assume kernels are compatible is to run the same distro. 
Because vendor kernels are sure not compatible, even running a 
kernel.org kernel on Fedora (for instance) reveals the the utilities are 
also tweaked to expect the kernel changes, and you wind up with a system 
which feels like wearing someone else's hat. It's stable but little 
things just don't work right.

-- 
    -bill davidsen (davidsen at tmr.com)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
  last possible moment - but no longer"  -me