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Roy
Asked: 2009-11-06 23:57:33 +0800 CST

Running Xen inside VMware?

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There are a number of Xen based virtualization products on the market, and like with other new software, there is a need to try them out in a lab environment before doing production installation on customer sites.

I'm wondering if you could possibly run Oracle VM, XenServer or Virtual Iron inside VMware ESX, ESXi or VMware Server for testing purposes.

Or essentially, is there any way to avoid purchasing a new hardware cluster for each product?

update> I've now virtualized a complete Oracle VM environment within VMware without issues. Naturally all the guests are PVM. This makes is possible for me to gain experience with the Oracle VM platform without a hardware budget. Thanks everyone.

virtualization

7 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can run Xen under VMware but you will only be able to run Linux guests (and other Xen-enabled guests).

    Without hardware virtualisation support Xen provides only paravirtualisation which requires modified system software in the guests. Most Linux distributions come with Xen-compatible kernels.

    The virtual machine created by VMware is a computer without hardware virtualisation support. I.e. VMware does not virtualise hardware virtualisation features.

    So you can run Xen and run Linux guests within it.

    But you cannot run Windows guests inside Xen.

    (And yes, it's fast enough. The problem is just the missing hardware virtualisation.)

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  2. As the others note, lack of VT extensions are going to rule most hypervisors out. Not to mention overheads.

    I have in the past used XenSource beneath another hypervisor (VMware mostly) for some specific staging tests. That works, but I wouldn't really recommend it.

    Even if you do getting running you're likely to run into so many quirks that it doesn't justify itself as a reliable testbed. If hardware is a constraint you'd probably be better off dual booting.

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  3. I use cheap desktops for this testing these days; you can get >4GB memory and VT CPU's.

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  4. The virtual CPUs presented by VMWare to each VM do not support hardware virtualisation.

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  5. Not really, you can fiddle about with things and get Xen to boot inside VMware Workstation, but then starting guest OS's and so on is generally not going to work well at all.

    It's much less hassle to buy a pair of very cheap HP ML110's or similar, but if you really want to do it, here's the instructions to install XenServer (which is very similar to both Oracle VM and Virtual Iron) on VMware workstation.

    One thing to note is that Virtual Iron has already been discontinued after it's purchase by Oracle, instead the features from it will be included in Oracle VM's next versions.

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  6. Even if you can trick it into working, you will not have a satisfactory experience.

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  7. If you use only paravirtualized guests, Xen will work fine under VMWare. Paravirtualized guests don't need any special hardware support.

    Its when you try to run unmodified guests that require hardware support under Xen (VT, AMD-V) that you'll get into trouble. The virtual processor given to Xen by VMWare will not have those extensions regardless of the underlying hardware.

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