Virtualization strategy when hypervisors don't work

[javaruby]

I have a core i7 2900K box with MSI motherboard (p67a-gd65 b3) that is not supported by either Citrix XenServer or Vmware ESXi 3.5/4.x.

;((

So I'm looking for alternatives for getting the virtualization. Can I get similar functionality of a hypervisor but within Fedora or CentOS, etc? Up to 20% degradation in performance (vs bare metal hypervisor) is acceptable.

thanks

[Lazydog]

I have an i7 here and use kvm which is built into the kernel of RH.
Running 1 host and 6 guests.

[javaruby]

thx for the tip. Does CentOs (and/or Fedora) come with kvm? Would it be advisable to go that way?

[javaruby]

I found this article on kvm (and xen) support in centos 5. Will try this out tonight.

wiki dot centos dot org slash HowTos slash KVM

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

[javaruby]

Looks like Xen does come along with certain linux distros (debian and rhel5/centos but not rhel6). Kvm may well be simpler to get going - it is also included in latest ubuntu's. An article from 2009 found that kvm does not scale well beyond a few heavily loaded vm's. Not sure if that has been fixed. Initially i may not need the performance anyways.

[Rubberman]

There are issues with xen, such as if you have an nVidia graphics board, you cannot use the proprietary drivers with the xen kernel. I think this is not a problem with kvm. Myself, I am using Oracle's VirtualBox. For the past 3+ years it has worked very well for me on all of my systems.

[javaruby]

@rubberman Although my mainboard is not supported by either Xen or Vmware hypervisors, am I correct in presuming that if I go the linux kernel route - i.e. using kvm or xen by way of linux as opposed to bare metal - in that case I'll be OK?

I've used virtualbox and vmware within windows host. Will using Xen or Vmware in the way described above be similar to that? I was hoping to go lower level than that - since I actually don't want the o/s (ubuntu or centos ..) to be in the way of the hypervisor any more than minimally necessary.

[Rubberman]

I have a core i7 2900K box with MSI motherboard (p67a-gd65 b3) that is not supported by either Citrix XenServer or Vmware ESXi 3.5/4.x.

Well, since neither Citrix nor VMware ESXi support this board, you need to look elsewhere, most likely. Time to apply the scientific principle and experiment. All of these have eval licenses to test their solutions on your hardware. VirtualBox does use the virtualization features built into the current Intel and AMD processors, so that should also be an alternative you might want to consider. Depending upon the number of CPU cores you allocate to your virtual machines, vs. the number of physical cores you have, you may be ok. Example: I have an 8 core Intel system and can run XP (1 core), Solaris (1 core), QNX Neutrino (1 core), and another Linux distribution (1 or 2 cores) without problems at the same time, each of which is performing significant processing tasks. Available RAM is the biggest issue here.