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Ewan MacMahon wrote: >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Testbed Support for GridPP member institutes [mailto:TB- >> [log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Grandi >> >>>> I am just looking around to find what is the commonly used VM >>>> Hypervisor in GridPP group (i.e Xen, KVM or etc) >>> KVM without a shadow of a doubt. It works, it's easy, and it's in SL5 >>> as standard issue. You'd need a good positive reason to go for >>> anything else these days. >> I agree with this. I would however say that while KVM is good, but in >> other contexts I have had good experiences with Xen, with a >> paravirtualized kernel, as paravirtualization can have reduced overheads >> compared to virtualization (even with AMD or Intel hw virtualization >> assist). >> > Not so much any more; suitably modern Linux distributions (which > in SL terms means 5.4 or later) use the 'virtio' device drivers > for networking and disk access which work on essentially the same > principle as Xen style paravirtualised drivers, rather than the > traditional 'emulated hardware' approach that full virt used to > use. The Intel X520 network card we have (we've got the 10GbaseT version) also supports SR-IOV. AIUI, this allows the network card to pretend to be several network cards which can be assigned to virtual machines - so the virtual machine is talking directly to the hardware. Presumably this should lead to enhanced performance. I think this prevents live migration though. Chris