OSS Virtualization options ...

[Nikos Vassiliadis]

On Thursday 20 December 2007 12:54:36 Norberto Meijome wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:43:22 +1100
>
> Norberto Meijome <freebsd at meijome.net> wrote:
> > wrt to QEMU,i don't think is fast enough to make it worth it - i think
> > you'd gain more by moving a bit to the side of freebsd for the host
> > and using other options (linux+ Vmware + freebsd as guest)
>
> I meant this in the context of using QEMU to run multiple simultaneous
> VMs for server virtualisation. I think it works OK(ish) for , say,
> running Windows on your bsd box....but i don't think you can compare it
> to something like Xen or VMWare or MS Virtual Server
>
> probably a bit behind Qemu in speed would be BOCHS, though I think it is
> a bit more flexible wrt to the machines emulated.

Hi Mark and Norberto,

Mark, what do you need to virtualize and what your requirements are?

I think the question about virtualization is far too broad.
For example, you mentioned quotas. I think you can bypass storage
control problems, using seperate devices for each client filesystem.
Just create n vnode md(4) devices for your n jails. This has another
advantage besides partitioning storage. Since UFS supports sparse
files, only used blocks will occupy storage space, thus you don't
have to preallocate all storage.

HTH a bit,

Nikos