Re: Xen and VMware

[Jacob Gorm Hansen <jacobg@diku.dk>]

Tom Hibbert wrote:
> Typical corporate talking head blah. Interesting that he talks about
> Vmotion as a 'killer technology' when Xen is already doing it. 
> If you read the interview there's quite a bit of Xen-bashing. The guy
> rags on the requirement for modification of the host kernel. He is
> comparing the two products as if they took the same approach, failing to
> mention that Xen's paravirtualisation architecture eliminates all of the
> costly performance overhead his company's product is famous for...

I still think you need to respect VMWare for breathing new life into 
virtual machine research. And I still think Xen can be improved (as is 
happening now) with regards to memory footprint etc. VMWare ESX is also 
likely to have some performance benefits from having the drivers in the 
kernel, even though that comes at the cost of them having to implement 
the drivers themselves. And the fact that they can host Windows is a big 
win with lots of customers.

VMWare does some amount of paravirtualization, with all the VMWare tools 
that you need to install. In fact, Xen seems to be going in VMWare's 
direction (shadow page tables, writable page tables, binary rewriting, 
Vanderpool support) in some areas.

The fact that I seem to have prior art for their 'killer technology' I 
just find kind of funny ;-)

Jacob


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