this is the first post for me in this forum ,
I was using centos for my business applications and now I am trying to work only with opensuse and install my other oprerating systems in it .
I was always using vmware , but I decided to try another virtualization technologies other than vmware for testing , I searched the internet and found many other like virtualbox , kvm , xen .
iI concluded from my search that xen and kvm will be the faster type , I decided to test them , I choosed xen , it is better thank kvm .
I installed opensuse 11.4 and installed xen hypervisor deployed two VMs windows xp and centos 4.8 , they are runing quite good but I have some questions :
1 : Isn’t there anyway to improve graphics performance in xen guest , or change the video card memory or type ?
2 : Isn’t there any way to copy and paste between the host and guest ?
3 : Isn’t there any free application like vmware tools or virtualbox guest tools for xen ?
4 : I use these VMs to install some applications for my geophysics work which requires good graphic performance in the vm , also I don’t them to be sluggish sometimes , which is better for that vmware or xen ?
I am sorry for that long post , but i want you to welcome in opensuse community , really I hate windows , don’t want to revert back to it anymore .
I will add some notes for my video card and proceesor :
I have Toshiba laptop sattelite A500-1F4 with intel core i5 processor and
nvidia geforce g330m video card , I installed my video card driver using
installer from nvidia website beside xen kernel as per a page in opensuse wiki .
well from what I understand the view that you get to the virtual machine with XEN is actually a VNC type tunnel.
you might get better video performance from VMware but then there is a licensing restriction on the software…
I am unsure about the smaller VMware Player restrictions…
the pro with XEN is full usb access without license restriction the con is less than stellar video.
I have used VMware Player it is quite useful, but once again I am unsure of the restrictions for other than private use.
there maybe an alternative like using teamviewer instead of the default vnc connection.
and yet another alternative…
since XEN does full USB it might be possible to get a usb video dongle to run a separate monitor that the guest would control native and that might be the ticket, I know your on a laptop so this might not be the ideal setup.
but it was just a thought.
when I try to add usb storage to xen guest it says that libvirt connection doesn’t support storage management or connection management I also have a problem adding network interface to the guest , during the creation of the guest it gave me error for the network card error due to bridging .
[QUOTE=ed_v;2337933 it might be possible to get a usb video dongle to run a separate monitor that the guest would control native and that might be the ticket, [/QUOTE]
this is a really smart idea , I can check prices and see that ,
as there is no other solution for improving graphics .
unfortunately it has been a while since I messed with XEN, however my suggestion is to login to a desktop as root to test the machines setup as this would reveal whether or not it is a permissions issue.
once again it has been a while since I messed with XEN, but I just landed a server tower than I can experiment on.
on a side note do your geophysics programs run on dos? (I have seen some civil software programs that are dos native…)
Install a NX server (NoMachine or FreeNX) on the guest and connect to it using a NX client. Then it’s almost perfect. The X server itself doesn’t even need to run on the guest.
You can use virt-manager to create and manage xen and kvm virtual machines locally or remotely.
That’s another problem. NX won’t give you better graphic performances on the vm itself but it is significantly faster than vnc (no doubt!).
You might be interested in taking a look at this thread: vm-create : create kvm virtual machines. It should work for xen vms with little or no change since it can handle both. I haven’t tested it on openSUSE 11.4 host yet (only 11.3, Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10).
I don’t know if it is possible because I am unsure how the X server would correlate the mouse movement across a monitor that isn’t in use on the host OS, in all reality I bet this is un-charted waters when it comes to what is possible IMO… so don’t get to much in a hurry.
if my guest os is windows can I install nx server on it and connect it with nx client ?
I searched the internet found something like suse linux drivers for xen guest Is this free ?