Thanks for that Billy. And the OpenVZ reference led me to a good introduction to virtualization page that explains the difference between the various tools. http://wiki.openvz.org/Introduction_to_virtualization
Great!
Thanks, Jim
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 9:47 PM, Billy Crook billycrook@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 21:28, Jim Herrmann kclug@itdepends.com wrote:
hell of a lot cheaper? Is there a better open source equivalent to
Citrix?
I couldn't find it with just a few minutes on Google. NX seems like it
NX is most likely the best Free Software Citrix replacement. They sell some commercial components which probably handle "management" of hordes of users.
Xen appears to be the open source equivalent to VMWare? Then there's KVM too, right?
Just exploring possibilities here and trying to get my mind around the
open
source virtualization world. Let me know what you think.
NX (and similar protocols/servers like xdmcp and vnc, and X11 forwarding) have nothing to do with virtualization.
VMWare is a company, not a program, so there is no Free Software equivalent thereto.
The closest match to vmware server is probably kqemu because like vmware server, kqemu does not require hardware vm support in the CPU, and like vmware, it supports virtual guests which are not modified specifically to support being virtualized. AFAIK though kqemu is not as performant as vmware server.
KVM is mostly considered to be the successor to Xen. KVM is the modern generic replacement for VMware server/esx in GNU+Linux systems. KVM does require hardware support in the CPU, but that's been standard now for about 5 years.
You should however, consider OpenVZ if all your guests will be running the same Linux kernel, or kqemu if emulation of other architectures is useful, and even consider if you need to be running multiple instances of an OS, or if all you really need is multiple server instances, which is often significantly more efficient.