[Ale-study] Virtualization?

[John]

Which virtualization tech will everyone be using?

Knowing which host OS you will use will help with December's ALE-NW 
meeting.  I'm planning to demonstrate setting up VirtualBox on both 
Windows and Ubuntu OSes, but the host OS that most of you here use will 
get more coverage.

VirtualBox isn't solid enough for servers, IMHO, but it is the easiest 
to deploy on Windows. On my hardware, virtualbox running on Ubuntu 
locked up multiple times after 4-6 days of a client running WinXP. Not 
just the client-VM - the entire physical server - I had to press the 
BRS. Unacceptable.
I have Xen VMs that run for months and months without issue, but Xen 
isn't directly supported by current Ubuntu or Redhat releases, so I 
wouldn't deploy that today. The Xen VMs are all 8.04 LTS Ubuntu which 
has a few more years of support. Stability of a host is critical to me.

http://blog.jdpfu.com/2009/12/22/virtualization-survey-an-overview has 
more of my thoughts on the different virtualization options suitable for 
servers. It is about a year old. Setting up a new VM server environment 
today on Linux for Linux VMs, I'd use KVM.  Desktop virtualization is 
different. If I had a budget for VM tools, my answer may be different, 
especially, if I needed to run Windows.

VirtualBox was discussed on the FLOSS Weekly podcast 
http://blog.jdpfu.com/2010/08/16/virtualbox-on-floss-weekly in August, 
which may be useful to some.

Please reply on-list with your virtualization plans.
Would talking about this on a conference call Wed night 7:30p be useful?