Anyone running vsphere 4 inside Xen?

[pete]

It's just for poking around with and testing vpshere, not production. I know Xen doesn't like running inside vmware (VT doesn't get passed on), but I can't find any reason not to do it the other way around?

[Duke]

Obviously VT not being shown to the guest OS would be a big issue, I didn't realise Xen could get around that. However, I wouldn't have thought it'd work because the hypervisor needs to be able to sit at ring-1 and talk directly to the hardware. I know the underlying hypervisor presents 'virtual hardware' to the guest OS but I don't know how it'd handle the intercepts to get the guest calls down to the virtual hardware then down the the real hardware.

 

Having said that, hosted virtualisation must have some solution, so maybe it'll work fine. Give it a try, just not on an important production box.

 

Chris

[pete]

Heh, s'not production. I think the deal is that if you try to install Xen inside a vm it has a lot more issues. VMware probably won't have access to VT either, but it doesn't bitch about it.

 

Apparently virtualbox can pass on VT, but this is for playing around with vsphere for a bit while I ponder if it's worth updating the lone ESXi 3.5 host or not.

[dhicks]

I know Xen doesn't like running inside vmware (VT doesn't get passed on)

 

Possibly related, or maybe just handy to know: Xen version 4 is now out. I could have sworn I read the release notes somewhere yesterday, but I can't seem to find them on Xen's website today - it's the sort of thing that normally gets a bit more of a fuss made of it.

 

--

David Hicks

[Duke]

[...] while I ponder if it's worth updating the lone ESXi 3.5 host or not.

 

From my basic experience, vSphere (i.e. ESXi 4.0) is awesome. Having said that, if you don't need any of the improvements or changes then it's nothing ground-breaking.