Comments on: Ubuntu picks KVM over Xen for virtualization

Breaking step with leading Linux sellers Red Hat and Novell, Canonical's next version of Ubuntu will make KVM its "main virtualization focus."

[HughJJorgan]

Why does it matter how old the virtualization specialist is?

"Soren Hansen, the Ubuntu Server Team's 26-year-old virtualization specialist" -- that little bit of information seems oddly placed.

[Shankland]

He shared his age, so I did too

I included his age after he did in his own self-description. You can choose to judge him or not as you like on the information, but in the media, it's common to say how old a person is or where he or she lives to add a bit more description of a subject.

[TBolt]

personal use rather than enterprise

Does this decision mean that Ubuntu developers only have their sights on the consumer market rather than the enterprise market? Is this part of the long-term strategy for the Ubuntu team?

[sorenh]

No..

We are very aware of the enterprise market as well. In fact, for our virtualisation efforts, that's the main focus. I disagree with Simon Crosby's statement that "KVM's approach is better suited to desktop machines than to servers."

It might seem to be true due to the way in which you invoke kvm and so on, but when you bring libvirt into the mix, this changes dramatically. libvirt includes a daemon that manages your kvm instances, allowing you to attach and detach from the console of your virtual machines, pause them, save their state and reload it later (or on a different machine), etc. Essentially everything you'd expect to do to your virtual machines in a production environment. If there's something you find that you need to do to make it suitable in a server environment that it can't currently do, please let us know, so that we can fix that :)

[rac171]

Actually, it's KVM and VMware

Canonical, the commercial backer of Ubuntu,
also partners with VMware. The combination of
VMware and KVM put us in a great position to
meet all the needs of our users.

Rick Clark

Ubuntu Server Team