Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
writing, no Citrix XenServer supplied Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris paravirtualized
drivers were available.
Table 4.5 describes the certification for Solaris as an x86 guest running on Citrix
XenServer on a Citrix XenServer supported host.
Table 4.5
Support for Oracle Solaris as a Guest of Citrix Xen Server
Citrix XenServer
Version
Guest OS
Certified
Tested
PV/HVM
5.5 U1
Solaris 10 10/09
No
Yes
HVM
VMware ESX is a component of both VMware Infrastructure (VI) version 3.x and
vSphere version 4.x. Each is a suite of products that adds management and reli-
ability services to the core server product. The basic server requires persistent
storage, typically hard disk based, for storing the virtualization kernel and sup-
port files. The use of centralized shared storage enables the use of features such as
VMotion (live migration). The ESXi product offers a small-footprint hypervisor on
the host with a simple configuration console primarily for network configuration
and the remote-based VMware Infrastructure Client Interface. This approach al-
lows for more resources to be dedicated to guest environments and offers the
option to place this small-footprint hypervisor on a dedicated hardware device.
ESX and ESXi basically consist of the same code; however, ESX includes a service
console operating system (COS) that is a standard Linux environment through
which a user has privileged access to the VMware ESX kernel. This Linux-based
privileged access allows the user to customize the environment by installing
agents and drivers, and by executing scripts and other Linux-environment code.
VMware ESX supports full virtualization using the combination of binary
translation and direct execution techniques. Binary translation replaces the in-
structions that are not able to be virtualized with new sequences of instructions
that have the same effect on the virtual hardware. Also, guest user-level code is
directly executed on the processor for high-performance virtualization. The VMM
provides each virtual machine with all the services of a physical system, such as
BIOS, virtual devices, and virtualized memory management. Using these tech-
niques, the virtual machine is fully abstracted from the underlying hardware.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search