Using Virtualization to create a server testbed

Virtualization is an important tool for web 2.0 and science 2.0 research labs. Through virtualization, you can test the effects of your changes on your end users in a rich approximation of their environment in an automated fashion, without destabilizing them. Much like Selenium, but at the next level down into the system.

A variety of commercial products for specific uses now have virtualization built in to them. For lab uses, though, you generally need to use one of the major virtualization platforms.

VMWare

VMWare is one of the oldest of the virtualization platforms. It runs on pretty much any OS, and a student version is available for free (yay, VMWare!)

Xen

Xen started out as the fedora project's virtualization framework, but has since graduated first to a wide variety of Linux distributions, and then to other Unix distributions. Xen uses modified kernels, so is much less resource intensive than VMWare.

Xen's documentation is, shall we say, in flux, as Xen moves from being tightly linked with fedora/Red Hat to being a more widely used system. We offer the following set of resources to help out in the transition...

• Xen User's Manual
• RHEL 5 Virtualization Guide

see also ServerAdminGuidelines