I am thinking up setting a Virtual LAMP server for my local development.I used VirtualBox and is totally satisfied.But,does Xen has benefits over Virtualbox?My processor supports Virtualization and I use x86-64 openSUSE.
On 06/20/2011 10:36 AM, Aatish910 wrote:
>
> I am thinking up setting a Virtual LAMP server for my local
> development.I used VirtualBox and is totally satisfied.But,does Xen has
> benefits over Virtualbox?My processor supports Virtualization and I use
> x86-64 openSUSE.
>
>
Xen is a Type 1 hypervisor… in other words, you boot Xen, not Linux when
running Xen. It’s more or less like VMware ESX. And just like ESX has a
controlling Red Hat VM, Xen has a Dom0 that is often times a Linux (e.g. in the
case of SUSE, obviously it’s a SUSE Dom0). … ESXi, VMware’s future doesn’t
use a control initial VM (just fyi… in case somebody wanted to know).
VirtualBox is a hypervisor that runs with Linux. This is called Type 2.
Similar to VMware Workstation.
Depending upon what you do with the OS in a Type 2, it might not be all that
different than a Type 1… but most people try to use the base OS for
non-hypervisor related tasks on a Type 2, so there can be additional risk… YMMV.
So… if this is a workstation, I’d go with VirtualBox (and likely take some
risk). If you have a higher end server like platform (lots of memory and
cores), you’ll like Xen.
But… the future is kvm… it will likely displace Xen for most. It’s better
than Type 2, more like Type 1 but gives many of the “workstation” style benefits
of a Type 2… it will get better and better with age…
Xen should outperform VirtualBox, but you may find some of VirtualBox’s
desktop-ish features aren’t present in Xen (e.g. like hardware video
acceleration). Each have their strengths. I use both where I work as well as
VMware ESX/ESXi, Hyper-V, RHEV-H and kvm.