RHEL – Xen vs. KVM

Let me just say I’m a big VMware fan. And since they started giving out ESXi for free, I try to pass on the love as much as possible.

However, sticking to open source values is very important to me for many reasons, and I recently discovered Xen is going away in RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I kinda figured it would die out as soon as Citrix bought up Xen.

So I dug around after a few emails with another virt guy.

Red Hat’s official statement:

http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2008/virtualization.html

I guess if you’re sticking with RHEL’s way of doing things, you had better give up on Xen and start working with KVM / Ovirt etc.

It seems Xen will continue to be supported through the 5.x series, as they have lots of customers using it. (hmmm…)

So I guess there will be a tool or some article for transitioning later on.

Ovirt – http://ovirt.org/
KVM – http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/Front_Page
FreeIPA – http://www.freeipa.org

However, this is all in a beta area for now.

My thoughts would be to simply go with VMware Server or ESXi server for production and then start testing the KVM solutions for future configurations. That’s just my two cents.

HTH