Not every GNU/Linux guide is written by an Intellectual

Setup Xen 3.4.1 & Libvirt on top of F12

Most people would agree with this statement. 98% of the world is intellectually challenged. The other 2% use GNU\Linux. However I do believe this statement will age with time because that 2% is growing. As it grows the intelligence level on the Linux side will drop and with it comes the intellectually challenged (evidence of this trend is based upon the existence of Mono and its supporters).

What does the article I linked at the top have to do with this? Simple, It’s a poorly written guide that I thought was written by someone smart because it was for GNU/Linux. After reading a bit a thought had popped into my mind “Why does this seem so complex vs other products?” and then “Doesn’t Redhat fully support KVM?”. I realised the irony of using Fedora with XEN would be the same as running Microsoft Server 2008 with VMware when you got Hyper-V pretty much built-in and fully licensed.

KVM is actually much easier to setup and when you update your kernel to the latest version everything is already done for you. You don’t need to track it’s own progress seperately, you get the latest version with every new kernel release. This occurs every 2-3 months according to the published kernel statistics. According to the source of those same statistics, its mentioned that Xen uses Linux’s subsystems for driver support. Why not just leave out the middleman and run with KVM? KVM also let’s you partition resources better making it easier to charge for CPU time. KVM doesn’t require any reconfiguration of GRUB to enable it, nor does it require a seperate KVM-enabled kernel in order to make use of virtualization.

Xen on the other hand is considered a joke by the community. It requires you download a XEN linux kernel (for Fedora at least). Most people use the product Sun made out of it, Virtualbox. Virtualbox is much easier and friendly to install, less of a joke and is better supported. Sun is even smart enough to tell users to try and install DKMS which will manage module upgrades in the event of a kernel upgrade. Virtualbox also doesn’t require modifying GRUB or having it’s own seperate kernel to boot into.

Another thing I noticed was that in the screenshots of Fedora I noticed the user was running as root, which I thought was quite stupid (and over a VNC session). I wouldn’t recommend anyone follow these badly made instructions. He also has you disable the firewall for some strange reason, which is a security risk.

Corrections:

Upon accusations the original Author of the article had commented and even fixed up his own article in regards to the firewall issue. I had originally said he probably didnt know how to configure a firewall. This is all that has been changed currently.

Seemingly agreeing with me on Xen though as he had nothing to refute.