Xen and VMware: Virtualization two apporcci
After news of the acquisition of XenSource by Citrix, has unleashed a media war on the future of virtualization. But in fact what are the differences between VMWare and Xen? In fact there are two different philosophies of virtualization among themselves, but will eventually give us the same result: you can run multiple virtual instances on the same physical host.
The virtualization in information exists since the beginning: it was already talking about virtualization on IBM mainframes in the early '60s to make the most of the expensive hardware then.
The world's first x86 virtualization products are now based on the Full Virtualization, or a virtual machine that emulates all the hardware necessary to run a guest operating system without needing to have it changed. VMWare uses this type of approach, of course with a series of enhancements related to access to some resources, in particular the CPU, memory, network adapters and dishi. In this way you can make virtual systems based on Windows, Novell, Linux and other systems that run on x86 platform.
If we talk instead of Xen paravirtualization (paravirtualization) and that is a virtual machine that does not need to emulate all the hardware, but provides a set of APIs (Application Program Interface) for use of the device. This implies that the virtual machine operating system should be modified to work properly, which is not possible in Microsoft environments.
Virtualization has also evolved by manufacturers of hardware, including Intel and AMD have introduced two extensions to the instructions of their processors (Intel VT and AMD-V) that allow you to better manage and transparently virtualization code. Through these implementations also products based on paravirtualization are able to run operating systems without need to make changes: XenSource, from version 3.0.3, is able to operate Microsoft virtual machines.
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Other articles on similar subjects:
- Xen comes to version 3.1.1
- Citrix / XenSource releases a security fix
- Citrix / XenSource announces OEM Edition hypervisor
- IDC publishes data on the server virtualization for Q4 2009
- VMWare on the hunt for talent in the house Citrix
- In London, the first independent conference on virtualization
- Virtualization Forum: The most complete Italian event on virtualization
