[OT?] value of virtualization that comes with RHEL 5.4?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i'm being offered the chance to teach an admin course based on RHEL
5.4, so i'll probably just do it under CentOS 5.4, but one of the
chapters deals with the virtualization facilities that come with 5.4.

  even though that's the latest release of RHEL/CentOS, it's still
fairly far behind the curve in terms of recent virtualization
developments as compared to fedora 12.  the client is currently using
vmware, so it's not clear they even *care* about the native
virtualization features of RHEL.

  in any case, is there any real value in discussing the
virtualization in RHEL 5.4, since the other two options are:

 1) blow off virt completely as explained in the manual, or
 2) switch to perhaps f12 just for that to show what's available
    *today*

thoughts?  no matter what the decision is, i can't see covering old
virtualization technology being of much use.

rday
--

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

            Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
========================================================================

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 09:33:42AM -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>  
>    i'm being offered the chance to teach an admin course based on RHEL
>  5.4, so i'll probably just do it under CentOS 5.4, but one of the
>  chapters deals with the virtualization facilities that come with 5.4.
>  
>    even though that's the latest release of RHEL/CentOS, it's still
>  fairly far behind the curve in terms of recent virtualization
>  developments as compared to fedora 12.  the client is currently using
>  vmware, so it's not clear they even *care* about the native
>  virtualization features of RHEL. 
The KVM based virtualization in RHEL-5.4 is not nearly so far behind
Fedora as you might think. The libvirt mgmt stack in RHEL-5.4 was
rebased to be near parity with Fedora 11, and KVM in RHEL-5.4 is
also pretty close to that using what's best described as a hybrid of
kvm-83 and kvm-84.

>    in any case, is there any real value in discussing the
>  virtualization in RHEL 5.4, since the other two options are:
>  
>   1) blow off virt completely as explained in the manual, or
>   2) switch to perhaps f12 just for that to show what's available
>      *today*
>  
>  thoughts?  no matter what the decision is, i can't see covering old
>  virtualization technology being of much use. 
Anything learnt by using libvirt + KVM in RHEL-5.4 will certainly be
very relevant to usage of libvirt + KVM in Fedora 12 and RHEL-6, and
vica-verca, so I wouldn't right it off was not worth while just because
F12 is newer

Daniel
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