XEN and the art of Virtualization
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Hey Neville, Do you have plans to add Powershell Script support to ED?
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
Currently working on C++/CLI in Action for Manning Publications. (*Sample chapter available online*)Nishant Sivakumar wrote:
Do you have plans to add Powershell Script support to ED?
Hi Nish, Funny I was just listening to a Podcast the other day where they were talking about how wonderful Powershell is. I've been meaning to download it and give it a try. I'm just working on adding Ruby support to ED and possibly Python. I'll look into Powershell.
Neville Franks, Author of Surfulater www.surfulater.com "Save what you Surf" and ED for Windows www.getsoft.com
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Nishant Sivakumar wrote:
Do you have plans to add Powershell Script support to ED?
Hi Nish, Funny I was just listening to a Podcast the other day where they were talking about how wonderful Powershell is. I've been meaning to download it and give it a try. I'm just working on adding Ruby support to ED and possibly Python. I'll look into Powershell.
Neville Franks, Author of Surfulater www.surfulater.com "Save what you Surf" and ED for Windows www.getsoft.com
Neville Franks wrote:
I'm just working on adding Ruby support to ED and possibly Python. I'll look into Powershell.
Good to hear that. Currently, PowershellIDE is the only editor for Powershell, and though I was initially impressed by it, it's not so stable and is not very functional (specially the editor). So if you could get Powershell support ready before other editors like Ultraedit, you may get a few extra sales just for that effort :-)
Regards, Nish
Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
Currently working on C++/CLI in Action for Manning Publications. (*Sample chapter available online*) -
Thanks. I actually was attempting to setup xen on a linux server at work earlier this week but I had a problem with nvidia driver crashing the hypervisor under 64 bit gentoo linux. I had no time to debug so I switched back to the previous kernel and I will try to fix that when I get some free time.
John
I don't know if its appropriate but the quick and easy way to get Xen running is to install the XenServer. This installs a version of Linix + the XenServer which you then access from another (Windows) PC using the Xen Admin Console.
Neville Franks, Author of Surfulater www.surfulater.com "Save what you Surf" and ED for Windows www.getsoft.com
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If you've used/use VMWare or Virtual PC you'll be interested in the latest virtualization products that use Hardware Virtualization available on AMD and Intel chips to get near bare metal performance. I've been playing with XenServer and it really is impressive and neat. I've blogged about it at http://blog.surfulater.com/2007/01/10/xen-and-the-art-of-virtualization/[^] for those wanting to know more. I have no association with these folks, just thought CP'ers would find this of interest.
Neville Franks, Author of Surfulater www.surfulater.com "Save what you Surf" and ED for Windows www.getsoft.com
I've been using VMWare for much the same purposes as you do for some time now and I saw somewhere a brief bit of info on Xen and check it out a few weeks back and your comments in your blog about their web site are spot on! I found the whole thing a bit vague and confusing, I got a better understanding of it reading your blog post in 5 minutes than I did spending quite some time going over their site and forum. While what they are doing is interesting, I'm sort of left with the feeling overall that they are a solution in search of a market with hardware being so relatively cheap these days.
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I've been using VMWare for much the same purposes as you do for some time now and I saw somewhere a brief bit of info on Xen and check it out a few weeks back and your comments in your blog about their web site are spot on! I found the whole thing a bit vague and confusing, I got a better understanding of it reading your blog post in 5 minutes than I did spending quite some time going over their site and forum. While what they are doing is interesting, I'm sort of left with the feeling overall that they are a solution in search of a market with hardware being so relatively cheap these days.
Besides being able to run linux and windows simultaneously on the same box I am interested in this type of technology to be able to do some server consolidation with beefier (2 to 4 cpu) servers but still have isolation so that I can keep specific tasks (www, ldap, dns, time server, samba, dicom, database server, backup ...) running under their own vm.
John
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I don't know if its appropriate but the quick and easy way to get Xen running is to install the XenServer. This installs a version of Linix + the XenServer which you then access from another (Windows) PC using the Xen Admin Console.
Neville Franks, Author of Surfulater www.surfulater.com "Save what you Surf" and ED for Windows www.getsoft.com
I was thinking of that but since the system (which was the only one I could spare that had a supported cpu) I was using already had the os configured with software raid 6, nfs, lvm, rsync ... I really wanted start off by just replacing the kernel and then migrating tasks to the VMs after I was sure every thing was working.
John
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Besides being able to run linux and windows simultaneously on the same box I am interested in this type of technology to be able to do some server consolidation with beefier (2 to 4 cpu) servers but still have isolation so that I can keep specific tasks (www, ldap, dns, time server, samba, dicom, database server, backup ...) running under their own vm.
John
John M. Drescher wrote:
.. to be able to do some server consolidation with beefier (2 to 4 cpu) servers but still have isolation ...
Yes thats definitely an area where Xen will be put to very good use. I know someone with 10 servers collacated at a Hosting company who is currently trialling Xen. He can likely drop to one or two servers and get a big cost saving in colo fees.
Neville Franks, Author of Surfulater www.surfulater.com "Save what you Surf" and ED for Windows www.getsoft.com
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Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
Instead of VMWare and Virtual PC, isn't XEN closer to WM Server and Virtual Server?
Possibly, but I've never used nor researched these products so I can't say. Do they use hardware virtualization? Also note that these is a free XEN Express version available.
Neville Franks, Author of Surfulater www.surfulater.com "Save what you Surf" and ED for Windows www.getsoft.com
Neville Franks wrote:
Do they use hardware virtualization?
VMWare Workstation/Server use VT for x64 guests. For x86 guests, it actually degrades performance, as the current VT architecture sort of takes an all-or-nothing approach and doesn't let VMWare blend their software virtualization techniques in with the hardware virtualization.
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I was thinking of that but since the system (which was the only one I could spare that had a supported cpu) I was using already had the os configured with software raid 6, nfs, lvm, rsync ... I really wanted start off by just replacing the kernel and then migrating tasks to the VMs after I was sure every thing was working.
John
Yes definitely a lot more challenging than a simple XenServer install on a clean machine. There are some Linux distro's that include Xen including the latest SUSE 10.2? release. That may be an easier & quicker path to follow.
Neville Franks, Author of Surfulater www.surfulater.com "Save what you Surf" and ED for Windows www.getsoft.com
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Yes definitely a lot more challenging than a simple XenServer install on a clean machine. There are some Linux distro's that include Xen including the latest SUSE 10.2? release. That may be an easier & quicker path to follow.
Neville Franks, Author of Surfulater www.surfulater.com "Save what you Surf" and ED for Windows www.getsoft.com
I finally got time to install xen and got it up and running. Wow, the disk performance is much better than with vmware. On a 6 disk (330 GB Seagate 7200.10) sata linux software raid6 I got the following numbers under linux for read performance (on a linux guest):
# hdparm -tT /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1:
Timing cached reads: 4360 MB in 2.00 seconds = 2182.28 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 752 MB in 3.00 seconds = 250.63 MB/secThe array does around 267MB/s native (on the 64 bit gentoo linux dom0 host) so this is very good...
John