Virtualization

For development environment, I enjoyed a lot on taking advantage of virtualization. Starting with Virtual PC - now free from MS, VMWare workstation and now the Server - Free, Q and Parallel on Mac OS, and .. anyway, virtualization rocks when your application environment does not need the whole host power! I would be very interested in trying out the Type 1 hypervisor, i.e. Xen and VMWare ESX server. Anyway, I would still argue for those applications that need AM(uch)AP CPU power and heavy I/O access to the memory or disks to wait on virtualization. Being able to access the hardware directly is definitely a huge plus to the over all performance for the operating systems.

p.s. I wonder how the performance reports provided by the virtualization vendors? The hypervisor can provide 90+% to the native performance; so, if there are 4 virtual machines - equally configuration, ideally, each gets 1/4. Is that completely true? It is always my biggest interesting on knowing network performance by the throughput; not the speed ..

So how about KVM from a 4 months 'new' company - Qumranet? Quote:

Kernel based Virtualization Machine (KVM)

Qumranet is the proud sponsor of KVM open source project. Leveraging new silicon capabilities, the kvm model introduces an approach to virtualization that is fully aligned with Linux architecture and all of its latest achievements. Furthermore, integrating the hypervisor capabilities into a host Linux kernel as a loadable module can simplify management and improve performance in virtualized environments, while minimizing impact on existing systems.

This is definitely interest to me. To you? http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki