octoberdan
June 7th, 2007, 11:55 AM
Noticed an interesting article on Linux Today that I thought my ubuntu brothers and sisters would find interesting. Apparently Xen now has a native 64-bit build, beating VMWare to the 64bit punch. Checkout the story at http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid94_gci1255875,00.html
Version 3.1 of the open-source Xen hypervisor, official word of which is imminently expected, now runs natively in 64-bit, making it possible to run any supported operating system in 64-bit or 32-bit mode
At 32-bit, Xen was limited to 16 GB of RAM per physical host, Crosby said. In contrast, 64-bit environments can address up to 16 TB of memory. So with previous versions of Xen, running "up to ten virtual machines per host is no problem," Simon said, but depending on how much memory you allocate to a VM (virtual machine), 16 GB of RAM can be quickly consumed by more VMs.
And a note on VMWare
VMware officially added 64-bit guest support to ESX this fall with the launch of version 3.0.1, even though the hypervisor itself runs as a 32-bit application.
...
ESX's ability to run 64-bit guests is "a remarkable hack, really," said Simon Crosby, CTO at XenSource, the leader of the Xen virtualization project. "I'm amazed that it works."
Version 3.1 of the open-source Xen hypervisor, official word of which is imminently expected, now runs natively in 64-bit, making it possible to run any supported operating system in 64-bit or 32-bit mode
At 32-bit, Xen was limited to 16 GB of RAM per physical host, Crosby said. In contrast, 64-bit environments can address up to 16 TB of memory. So with previous versions of Xen, running "up to ten virtual machines per host is no problem," Simon said, but depending on how much memory you allocate to a VM (virtual machine), 16 GB of RAM can be quickly consumed by more VMs.
And a note on VMWare
VMware officially added 64-bit guest support to ESX this fall with the launch of version 3.0.1, even though the hypervisor itself runs as a 32-bit application.
...
ESX's ability to run 64-bit guests is "a remarkable hack, really," said Simon Crosby, CTO at XenSource, the leader of the Xen virtualization project. "I'm amazed that it works."