[ale] Debian virtualization suggestions

[Andrew Grieser]

On Mon, Jun 08, 2009 at 08:19:07AM -0400, Geoffrey wrote:
> > 	While not on Debian specifically, I know it's available and supported,
> > I've had great success with using Xen virtualization myself. I've used
> > it, VMware and Sun VirtualBox and find Xen to have given me the best
> > performance.
> 
> One of my clients has an 8 node Red Hat cluster that runs multiple Xen 
> virtual servers on top of that.  It's sweet if you're running Linux. 
> Windows is a bit of a dog on top of Xen as it's got to be fully virtualized.

I've been wondering about Xen vs KVM. If I want to run Debian on top of Debian, is it better to use KVM or Xen? I'm using Xen on top of LVM now, and it's working just fine, but I think it would be nice to be able to install a normal Debian system.

Right now I have to use the xen-tools scripts, which I half like and half dislike. It's nice to be able to cache all of the debs so that you can install a completely new OS in about 15-20 seconds. However, I'm lacking confidence in since it defaults to installing without udev. This makes me wonder what else is not-quite-right in the xen-tools re-packaged Debian.

So how does KVM compare to Xen in terms of management and installation? For running Debian on Debian, which would be recommended?

Andrew