[nycbug-talk] shared hosting

[Isaac Levy]

Hi Sunny, All,

On Jan 25, 2005, at 8:25 AM, Sunny Dubey wrote:

> On Monday 24 January 2005 14:33, Isaac Levy wrote:
>
>> Noo!  Please respond on-list, I'd like to know too!
>>
>
> I can provide virtualized NetBSD hosting.  You log in as root do 
> whatever you
> want, run your own networking firewalls, etc etc etc.  This is *not* 
> jail()
> or any jail() derivative, it is something more powerful/flexible 
> called XEN.

I don't mean to be confrontational with what folows, seeing as you and 
I have a decent dialouge with some lively banter, but I gotta ask you 
to put your money where your mouth is with XEN here man.

I never think it's fair to say one thing is more or less 
powerful/flexible than another, and of course, your bound to meet 
resistance pimping a Linux based product on a BSD mailing list <g>.


--
Question:

Sunny- for the purposes of the archive for this BSD oriented list, can 
you please explain *why* XEN is more powerful/flexible than jail(8)?

I'm not sure, but for a BSD based mailing list, I'd think that it 
should be clearly stated that you'd be running a NetBSD Virtual Machine 
image, running inside of XEN, on a Linux distro?

--
Additional Questions:

- Does XEN support VM's of other OS's, or does only NetBSD fit the bill 
due to it's rep. for hardware compatability?  (i.e. to meet some funky 
stuff in the VM?)

- Are there any fundamental differences in how the VM accesses devices, 
memory, networking, etc... which is different than in jail(8)'ing or 
User Mode Linux (UML)?

- How long has XEN existed, and beyond the commercial backing, what 
kind of history does XEN have for stability and maturity in 
production-level environments, especially large-scale systems running 
on the public internet?

- How does XEN fundamentally work?  I have read the XEN virtual machine 
papers, available here,

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/performance.html

but it only seems to cover like systems- and seems to be focused 
primarily on performance (an issue with classical emulation systems).

jail(8) is fundamentally ridiculously simple by design, which I see as 
an important factor when working with the complexity which arises, in 
the context of virtualizing services as complex as Operating Systems.
How does XEN help an administrator manage the complexity, and how 
complex is the actual virtualization mechanism itself?  (i.e. is it a 
'large' software like VMWare and the like? [I'm asking in the context 
of the relatively few lines of kernel code that make up the whole of 
Jail(8)])


> (which is openly backed/supported by the likes of IBM and Intel)
>
> (the FreeBSD port to XEN is somewhat new and shaky)
>
> contact me offlist if interested
>
> Sunny Dubey

Rocket-
.ike