[BBLISA] RHEL5 virtualization and/or vs VMware

[Chaos Golubitsky]

On Wed, 23 May, 2007 at 11:02:31 -0400, Scott Ehrlich wrote:

> Does this mean RH has its own way to support multi OSes with no need for 
> VMWare, or does it augment VMWare?

RHEL5's virtualization support uses a combination of Xen (the Red
Hat/Fedora virtual machine monitor) and KVM (the new RH/Fedora kernel
virtualization technology, about which i don't know as much), with Qemu
providing a lot of the interface.

So it's all based on the various open source alternatives to VMWare,
not on VMWare itself.  My understanding is that new x86 hardware
has better support for virtualizable instructions, so that you can
get closer-to-native speeds on your VMs using open source software if
you have a recent computer (VMWare has its own hacks to achieve fast
virtualization speeds), but i don't know much about the details of this.

Chaos