[Xen-users] Re: Noobie questions about Xen

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 11:46:38AM -0500,
 Randall Hand <randall.hand@xxxxxxxxx> wrote 
 a message of 92 lines which said:

> 1) What does Xen give me over VMWare? (This is a government site, so
> $$ is not a problem)

It is free software (free as in free speech, not free as in free
beer).

There are also probably performance differences but I did not measure
it myself, see the Xen Web site, I believe there are benchmark results.

> 2) With Xen, as I understand it, it essentially operates as an
> OS.. booting first, then loading Linux and/or windows. Is this
> right?

Not really. The Xen hypervisor runs side-by-side with the "dom0", the
first OS (the only one with hardware access). So, you run a "dom0" OS
(today, with Xen 3, I believe it can only be Linux). Then you start
"domU", each domU running a different OS (I run FreeBSD, NetBSD and
various Linux).

> 3) Will it work with Redhat Enterprise 9.0?  What versions of Redhat
> will it work with ? (Redhat seems to be the favored distro around
> here)

I see no reason why not. Check http://www.xen-get.org/ or
http://jailtime.org/ for ready-made OS images. They have Fedora
images, for instance.

> I don't really want to dedicate 4G of ram to Windows that I can't
> use in Linux.

I'm afraid that you have no choice with Xen 3 : memory allocation is
static and defined at boot-time

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