[olug] Virtual Instance of Linux

[Phil Brutsche]

Daniel Linder wrote:

> Eric Penne wrote:
> 
>>I was curious.  I'm having trouble with my fileserver 166MHz Pentium with
>>32MB of ram.  Next to it sits a Via 833MHz with 256MB of ram as a
>>webserver.  Is it possible to run 2 instances of Linux on one processor so
>>that 1 acts as a fileserver and 1 acts as a webserver and they just share
>>resources?  I know IBM and others have done this but I didn't know if the
>>average joe like me could do it.
> 
> 
> Well, you can check out VMWare -- EXCELLENT product by the way! -- or you
> can try the user-mode linux version.  I haven't used it but hear it is
> good for virtual systems...

UML (user-mode linux) works well, but can have performance problems.

VMware works well, but keep in mind that it is memory intensive - last 
time I used VMware memory usage was whatever you gave the guest OS + 
32MB for use by each VMware instance.

XEN (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/) gives you 
something more akin to a large IBM system on generic PC hardware.  It's 
somewhat... experimental however (a specially-patched Linux kernel is 
the only OS that currently runs on it).

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at brutsche.us