XEN on RHEL 6

Hi guys.

I read that RHEL will not support XEN in version 6 and it will support KVM. Does this mean we can't install XEN from RHEL repositories? Should we install it from source code?

If it is not professionnal, you can try to play with Qube which is supposed to be an ultra securized hypervisor XEN based with many code optimisations (network driver i think, since Xen is known to be slow regarding this area) supporting new intel VT instruction set for virtualization.

I would think carefully about using Xen under RHEL 6. Using Xen means recompiling your kernel and thus you lose Red Hat Support..

No need to roll your own. There are a numbers of parties preparing RPMs of the XEN hypervisor, tools and dom0 kernel for RHEL6. Keep an eye on the xen-users mailing list.

Is it good to migrate to KVM? I can't find much material such as books or tutorials for KVM to learn. Could anyone help me.

If you want a migration path from XEN on GNU/Linux platforms, then your choice is KVM. So, yes, it would probably be worth your time learning about KVM.

Unfortunately, at present the documentation on KVM is poor to downright incorrect - especially in the areas where KVM and QEMU overlap.

Also, Red Hat's DESIGN for "kvm" (lowercased and quoted intentionally) is RHEV. So if you're a Red Hat corporate user, you want Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. If you want an unsupported hypervisor experience using RHEL, then you can use the kvm (without quotes) that comes with it.

I have read in the documentation that there is Redhat Virtualization Manager. But it said you must download it from redhat network. But We are using CentOS in our company. How can we use it?

Another question is why RHEV Manager is for windows? Why redhat would make software for God Damn Windows? Is there any Linux version?

RHEV-M (piece one of a two part product) was originally created by Qumranet, along with the proprietary mgmt protocol it uses for kvm. It's written as a .Net application (requiring W2K3r2 and SQL Server/Express, etc.). The RHEV-H side is designed to be a non-seen Linux distro running kvm. The idea is to shield all of the RHEV-H under the controls of RHEV-M.

Red Hat originally looked at existing ways to run the .Net app... but that would involve things .Net on Linux (e.g. Mono) and Red Hat feels that's too risky. So the plan (AFAIK) is to rewrite RHEV-M as a JBoss Java app (sorry, still two pieces, you'll need a JBoss platform).

AFAIK, there's no way currently to get at any piece of RHEV-M or RHEV-H (for that matter). RHEV-H is an appliance style implementation... if you've ever seen this, that means the resulting platforms is done by unrolling files... the result is considered to be volatile. It's not well documented. It makes rolling in a kernel parameter (for example and from own experience) rather difficult since you have to unroll things, change things and roll things back up.

RHEV-H is a fairly typical appliance style Linux deployment, if you've ever used one. Just might be a bit cumbersome for users that have never done anything like that.

And, remember that it requires a SEPARATE subscription. It's NOT RHEL. It's considered a totally different thing.

If I were a CentOS user today, I'd just use plain ole standard kvm. If you HAVE to mimic Red Hat exactly, you'll need to wait until Red Hat makes those pieces available (if they haven't already) and wait for CentOS to figure out the best way to deploy it.