Which virtualization solutions are available for non-x86 platforms?

Question

Are their any virtualization solutions like Xen, KVM and VMWare ESX available for non-x86 platform? Especially I'm interested if there are solutions available or if Xen, KVM can be made to run on the platforms

• POWER5/6/7
• PowerPC
• Itanium 64
• NEC SX-8/9
• Cray X2
• BlueGene

What are your experiences?

Is it possible to virtualize GPUs like Nvidias Tesla/Fermi?

Answer 1

basalisk does 68k reasonably well, and while abandoned, pearpc is worth a look as a PPC emulator. Other than that hercules comes to mind - it emulates mainframe systems like the 390 and z series on a PC

Answer 2

QEMU is Free (libre) and runs on a lot of platforms, but won't be the fastest thing around.

Answer 3

I understand QEMU is a CPU translator, not a "virtualisation solution" like VMware... Basilisk etc are emulators.

* POWER5/6/7

IBM Power Series computers bring their own solution. I think it's called the IBM Hypervisor.

* PowerPC

Mac-on-Linux worked excellently: http://mac-on-linux.sourceforge.net/

I used it to run Mac OS and Mac OS X on Linux.

Sheepshaver was nice: http://sheepshaver.cebix.net/

It ran Mac OS on BeOS.

And then, of course, there was Apple's Classic Environment which allowed running Mac OS 8 or 9 under Mac OS X.

I understand Xen has a PowerPC port as well, but I'm not sure what state it is at.

* Itanium 64

HP offer a solution which can be bought with HP servers. It is a Type-1 (bare metal) hypervisor and hosts HP-UX and Windows Server 2008.

There is also some sort of Parallels product: http://www.parallels.com/solutions/virtualization/itanium/

* NEC SX-8/9
* Cray X2
* BlueGene

Don't know anything about those machines.