Re: [Xen-users] VMWare vs. Xen, is the conflict by VMware deliberate?

["Nick Couchman" <Nick.Couchman@xxxxxxxxx>]

ALL VMware products, including their FREE products support CPU and memory virtualization.  Running VMware on top of Xen is redundant.

 

In most cases you may be right - it may be redundant - but not in all cases.  I've run into situations where I'd like to run VMware in my dom0.  One case was where I have a 32-bit box with 2 CPUs and 8GB of RAM.  Because it's 32-bit, I can't run HVM (Windows) on Xen so I'd like to be able to use VMware in dom0 for my Windows VMs and then use Xen for my Linux VMs.  VMware's products, including their free ones, may do CPU and memory virtualization, but most of them don't do paravirtualization, which has some great performance benefits for kernels that support it.  In my case, I ended up settling for Qemu on Xen in my dom0 for Windows and Linux PV domUs.  As an added benefit to using Qemu, I can swap the disk images between Xen HVM on my 64-bit machines and Qemu on my 32-bit machines.

 

-Nick

>>> On 2008/02/22 at 12:29, "Ndex Server" <ndex.srvr@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

VMware supports hardware virtualization.

 

VMware supported VMX (Intel Silicon virtualization) before Xen did, it was the first product to launch with commercial support for hardware virtualization.

 

 

On Mon, Feb 18, 2008 at 4:36 AM, Sadique Puthen <sputhenp@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> I've been trying to virtualize SCO OpenServer 5.0.6 for various
> reasons, and found that the Xensource 4.x doesn't support it, nor does
> the open source Xen 3.x in any of the environments I've tried. It
> works on VMware, but for various reasons I prefer to use Xen on my
> Dom0. (I like open source, and the base OS for the commercial reasons
> is much, much more recent, and I suspect the Xen Dom0 performance for
> managing backup systems is superior.)
>
> So, I tried running VMWare Workstation on top of a Xen enabled Dom0.
> And VMWare promptly started up with a "You're running a Xen
> Hypervisor! Bad sys-geek, no biscuit! We're taking our start-up tool
> and going home, p-b-b-b-b-b-b-t-h!"
>
> Is this a well-founded refusal to start on their part, perhaps due to
> kernel behavior conflicts? Or is this an anti-competitive move,

VMware requires that your host kernel be run in ring 0 (to do cpu
scheduling, memory management and provide timer interrupts) where as in
xen architecture hypervisor has taken ring 0 and deprivileged the guest
kernel (dom0 kernel) to other rings. So running VMware on dom0 doesn't
allow it to virtualize cpu, memory. My 2 cents

--Sadique

> to avoid being able to run VMware Workstation on Xen Dom0's and force
> people to select VMWare only? I've not taken apart the kernel modules
> well enough to tell, but I hate to have to dedicate entire servers to
> VMware: it can absorb the resources I'd otherwise use to provide Xen.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-users mailing list
> Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
>


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