Microsoft, Novell shake hands on virtualization Odd couple Microsoft and Novell are reaffirming vows to let their products play nice together with an announcement of full joint support of SUSE Linux run as a guest operating system on Window's virtualization hypervisor, Hyper-V. The deal spins from Microsoft anointing Novell as its pet Linux distribution back in 2006, while …
Sort of defeats the purpose of virtualisation. You'd actually would like the host OS to be stable and put less stable stuff as a virtual server on top of that.
Even if running images can be moved to another server temporarily, while patch Tuesday roars past every month, I'd prefer not having to do that.
Running Linux under Windows.. Well it works, but not as good as running Windows under Linux.
I did some tests a while back and found that running a Windows 2k AD Server virtualized under Linux was 5% faster then running it on the same hardware without the virtualization.
Linux runs virtualized under windows ok, but you get some intresting network lag spikes on VMware.
Just thought I would share.
What person in their right mind would virtualise Linux on a Windows platform? Windows running in a VM on Linux I can understand, a lot of people do it so that when windows gets clogged up with malware or gets fucked over by a badly tested patch they can just revert the image and re-start the virtual server....
ah well, an amusing start to my Friday I must say!
When I'm being lazy and want to try something quick and dirty I run a linux box under windows.
As I said when I'm being lazy.
Once I have the idea working I will then drop it onto my lunix cluster or onto a dedicated host depending on what I am doing.
But I agree it is great for UAT and trying to figure out what the latest "Critical" OS patch from our friends at Microsoft will do to that Business Critical Windows Application that the bean counters use and can't live without.
I wonder if you can run the Microsoft VM stuff on a Linux VM machine?
They should really certify it the other way too - windows guests running on top of a suse linux system running xen or kvm or whatever hypervisor technology suse supports.
This is more useful for many reasons...
Linux can be stripped down much more, leaving you with a lot less scope for security holes or patches that need installing... Aside from that far less linux patches require a reboot - the impact of rebooting a box that hosts multiple virtual images is quite extreme and well worth avoiding if possible, and having to reboot a vm server because of a web browser patch is just insane.
Having a stripped down host also reduces overheads, running a vm hypervisor should not need several gigs of disk space, save it all for your images.
People migrating to linux may find themselves with one or two apps that require windows, running them on a vm until they can be replaced is a common situation. People migrating away from linux often don't have such constraints because most linux apps follow standards and can be easily replaced, or are open source and have been recompiled for other platforms.
Migrating critical Windows servers to Linux is less risky if you switch individual services to a Linux VM running on the same server. Once you have enough services running in the Linux VM, then switching over completely to a native Linux server becomes much easier.
And vice versa, of course.
"They should really certify it the other way too - windows guests running on top of a suse linux system running xen or kvm or whatever hypervisor technology suse supports."
It is and you can.
This is one of the results of the Novell/Microsoft lovefest that everyone bitches about.
"Linux can be stripped down much more, leaving you with a lot less scope for security holes or patches that need installing." said Joe Montana.
I would bet good money Mr Montana has not actualy looked at the roles on Windows 2008. Not only is the core role tiny with a tiny attack surface for bad people to shoot at it is MUCH simpler to set up that minimal environment than on any Linux disto I know.
Don't confuse an old windows desktop you once used with a proerly managed Windows server.
Anyone recall the time when inhererntly insecure server (iis) was so insecure it had to be hidden behind Linux servers to deliver m$ web presence ?
Now as Obama recently said : 'you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig'. The same with vi$ta. It is the same bloated, rotten wrinkley old whore underneath as previous versions of window$, except they've thrown in 20 tons of lard to boot (and re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-boot, etc).
So by anology, window$ $erver 2008 is most likely the same as vi$ta, because by analogy this part of m$ has been sat on it's ass for the last decade as well. The good news is that it will take about a year for any malware to install on a system like this owing to it being so slow due to bloat, so you should have some time to notice that the old whore is ill :-).
Now lets take a proper look at the task scheduling/handling algorithms employed by *nix, and *do$e. *nix employs proper POSIX compliant handling, so kill -9 something really does make it fuck off the system there and then. The equivalent in the m$ environment (aka cesspool) gives you the limp wristed 'it won't go away cos it's not responding' shite. *nix systems are also much better at handling rogue processes than the m$ *do$e offerings, again because of POSIX.
So I have to say I agree with the guys on here who say that Linux VM on m$ is the wrong way round. I give my reasons above.
Flame because I expect the m$ fans to 'reply' ! Bring it on fanboys !
taskkill -f does the same thing as kill -9
Yeah, I remember the time when IIS had to be hidden behind *nix. Though I live in todays world where a Windows IIS server behind a firewall is fine. Good enough for Nestle, Vodafone, Alliance & Leicester and millions of other enterprises....
The kernel of Windows has been as secure and reliable as Linux for a good decade. Both Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 share the same kernel, however that's about as far as it goes.
However Server can be setup with no GUI, no IE, no explorer - nothing. Just IIS or AD or DNS etc. Hosting VM's on this would be fine - including Linux guests.
The advantage is also that you know when a patch is coming out for Windows, rather than it just appearing as it does on Linux.
Other than the above, you didn't actually make any other points so I guess this is as much as I can "bring it on"... :-S
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
