--- Virtualization (@cfisk & @ramareth) ---

Co-led by @cfisk (who's working with KVM on Ubuntu 9.04 wants to know more) and @ramereth (OSU Open Source Labs, who knows more and wants to understand the questions).

Basic questions:\\
- What are the options?\\
- What should I do?\\

Reasons to use virtualization
  * Sandbox testing: I want to try something new without trashing my existing system setup
  * Separate staging environment
  * Datacenter resource management

@ramareth: 
  * OSL uses Xen mostly, but has tried KVM (can't use it everywhere due to Vt req't)
  * Uses Virtualization mostly to help clients scale without requiring new hardware
  * IBM Bladecenter with 14 blades, running 55 VMs; iSCSI backend makes it easy to migrate between nodes; LVM partition for each VM.
  * (Hitting weird limits on iSCSI, but most of the iSCSI alternatives suck as much as NFS does)
  * Lots of RAM is key: 4G each (6-7 VMs in each box). Xen grabs RAM at startup, KVM can swap

What are the options?

  * Xen
    * pro: more mature; lot of stable features
    * con: requires special (dangerously old?) kernel on Dom0 (may be fixed soon?)

  * KVM
    * pro: RedHat & Ubuntu are focusing support on KVM
    * con: requires AMD or Intel paravirtualization extensions (VTi); may not perform as well as Xen (@znmeb's interested in this)
    * virtIO for disk/network/console is useful
    * supports multicore guests

  * VMWare
    * easy if you just want a sandbox
    * Takes advantage of CPU virtualization if it's there
    * Workstation edition ($$) can clone.

  * VirtualBox (There are two versions: an open-source edition, & Sun's proprietary version)
    * easy if you just want a sandbox
    * Takes advantage of CPU virtualization if it's there
    * has easy snapshot support

  * QEMU / Bochs
    * supports emulation of other architectures (eg, MIPS on x86) for cross-development

  * HyperV - Microsoft's server virtualization

  * VirtualPC - Microsoft's desktop virtualization suite
    * supports cloning with a little work
    * hardware support is questionable
    * Windows 7 supports running Windows XP in a virtualization sandbox (using this?)

  * Parallels - Mac only
    * people use this or VMWare Fusion

  * then there's the cloud...
    * Amazon EC2
    * Eucalyptus in Ubuntu 9.10, matches Amazon EC2 API
    * CloudKick - put EC2 instances on SliceHost

Other Resources
  * libvirt (abstraction layer for managing VM environment; gui, cmdline, & API)
  * Ganeti (google management tool)
  * Conga (RedHat's cloud virtualization suite)