[mythtv-users] Virtualisation in the home network – ready for mainstream?

[Jarod Wilson]

On Sep 2, 2009, at 9:01 AM, Greg Woods wrote:

> On Wed, 2009-09-02 at 15:51 +1000, Jon Whitear wrote:
>
>> This raises a few questions, first of which is “Is virtualisation
>> ready for the mainstream?”
>
> The answer, from my experience, is "it depends". I can't speak for
> Gentoo, you might be better off asking in a Gentoo forum. My  
> experience
> is with Fedora.
>
> Getting VMware workstation to work is always a struggle. I have to  
> find
> the magic vmware-any-any-update# that works. I have yet to get it
> working under Fedora 11; the kernel modules fail to build.

WMware doesn't really give a damn about you unless you're running an  
Enterprise linux distribution.

> Fedora 11
> does come with KVM virtualization out of the box. My experience with
> that is mixed. I have only tried running Windows XP VM's because  
> that's
> what I really need it for (the usual small handful of proprietary
> applications that I'm forced to use at work plus some games). On my  
> work
> systems, both of which have Intel Core 2 processors, one a laptop and
> one a desktop, it was easy to set up and the performance is very good.
> Hard to tell I'm in a VM.

I use kvm on Fedora extensively, on my machines that have hardware  
virt extensions.

> At home, where I have a dual core Pentium 4
> system, performance is horrible. Some applications are so slow that  
> they
> are unusable. Shutdowns don't work cleanly, I frequently have to  
> restart
> the libvirtd service. To boot the blasted thing I usually have to  
> try 3
> or 4 times; it crashes down to the "safe mode" boot screen repeatedly,
> but if I keep telling Windows to boot normally, it eventually does  
> (then
> it's slow).
>
> So from my experience, KVM performance depends on exactly what  
> hardware
> you have.

Are you sure you're actually running KVM and not just qemu on that  
Pentium 4 system? At best, that's a machine with very very early  
hardware virt extensions, and the early versions were... Well, not  
very good.

If VMware kernel modules don't build and KVM is painfully slow,  
consider trying VirtualBox. The open source edition is even packaged  
in some 3rd-party Fedora repos, and unlike VMware, Sun (and  
contributors) are actually on top of making sure everything works on  
current upstream kernels. I'm running it myself on an older machine w/ 
gobs of disk and memory but no hardware virt extensions, works quite  
well.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com