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As there is a Cygwin which is API-level VM, I guess there maybe similar one in Linux? Or, generally which hypervisor is fastest? I'm only care about Linux. BTW, I can't install Xen in Ubuntu Maverick, so I can't have any experience on it. BTW2. I'm searching for light weight hypervisors, to research distributed computing, distributed sessions and networking topics.
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lxc Linux Containers are lower overhead than any solution which virtualizes the whole kernel. Like Linux VServer or OpenVZ, each "container" shares the same kernel with the rest of the system, but other resources (filesystems, users, network, process trees) are separated. While these three have varying capabilities, lxc has the distinct advantage of being integrated in the mainline kernel already – no third-party patches required, works on all hardware, etc. I'm currently using LXC to virtualize various build environments (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora) inside my Gentoo host system, and it works well. | |||
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kvm is pretty fast, but as with all things it depends on how you set it up. You'll likely find the I/O is the bottleneck. | |||
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Cygwin is not really a VM. Its an API-level emulator. Having used a number of VM products, the one I find fastest for everything I have thrown at it is VMware player. Its also free. Xen and its various derivatives are reasonably good, I've just found on the same h/w that VMware seems to do better. | |||
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Take a look at Linux VServer, which is a kernel-level "VM"; all your virtual machines will use the same kernel, but have different userspaces. I haven't had time to play around with it a lot, but from what I've seen, it could be what you're looking for. | |||
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ProxmoxVE uses a lightweight perl interface to KVM, with a smaller footprint than the libvirt library, that's a C variant AFAIK. It's a minimal bare-metal server-installation. http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Main_Page QEMU's pretty quick, especially if you remove the vCPU compatibility & let the guest have at the host CPU functions directly. http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Tuning_KVM Recent improvements to paravirtualized drivers have allowed network throughput to jump approximately 8x what they were with previous offload methods. http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/VhostNet QEMU also lets guests have a physical disk from the host as their virtual disk, removing the overhead involved in using disk images, although .raw images on LVM is still quite fast & provides the valuable snapshot functionality. | ||||
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I cannot notice any difference between running on bare-metal and running on VMs on VMware ESXi. It can run from a small USB flash drive, so I would say that it is pretty lightweight. | |||||||||||||
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