[Oneiric-Topic] Revisit Xen support

[Clint Byrum]

Excerpts from Michael Zoet's message of Sat Apr 02 01:20:36 -0700 2011:
> 
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Am 02.04.2011 02:05, schrieb Raphaël Pinson:
> > On Sat, Apr 2, 2011 at 1:51 AM, Clint Byrum <clint at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> >> Excerpts from Chuck Short's message of Wed Mar 30 07:27:50 -0700 2011:
> >>
> >> Just playing devil's advocate here.
> >>
> >> Other than people already having familiarity with Xen, what is a
> >> compelling reason to support it in favor of, or in addition to, KVM?
> >
> >
> > Familiarity is a good reason I think, but also industry standards, and
> > hardware considerations. I think a lot of big companies expect major
> > distributions such as Ubuntu to provide a proper support for such a
> > standard as Xen. I know it came as a disappointment for us that using
> > Lucid as a (production) Xen dom0 was nearly impossible. Also, afair,
> > KVM requires hardware support. Most recent machines provide it, but
> > it's not rare to find servers that are too old to use it, and then
> > you'd rather use Xen for servers than VMWare...
> >
> 
> I agree with that! Really big companies choose the things they know.
> And if they have to switch the distro they do it.
> 

Noted. It sounds like Xen has a lot of inertia.

> Another advantage for Xen: it is more mature and easier to setup (at
> least for me because I have only one configuration file I can change
> with vim). Much more documentation around that works. You have much
> more network options. And you can easily assign a hardware NIC to a VM
> with Xen. With KVM this does not work on every hardware... (Now I have
> 2 15.000,- ? servers where I can not do the things with KVM I could
> easily do with Xen. This was a pitty experience...)
> 

I feel like a broken record, but could you provide us with some facts
to back up these claims? Bug reports, manual pages, etc.


I feel like there is a lot of anecdotal evidence, but we shouldn't make
our decisions just because somebody says KVM can't do this or Xen can
do that.