On Wed, 1 Apr 2009 08:39:36 -0400 (EDT)
Robert P. J. Day wrote:
and it occurs to me to ask whether anyone would want to get
*seriously* into virtualization without having machines with those
extensions.
Depends - the Xen style paravirt stuff works well (for some definition
of "well") without hardware support.
is it safe to say that, by now, most modern systems come with VT
or
AMD-V support? and by "serious" virtualization, i don't mean someone
downloading and goofing around with it, i mean people who want to set
up virtual corporate servers or mission-critical stuff.
My current experience with using virtual machines for testing tools
such as debuggers that interact with the system at a low level leads
me to suspect that mission-critical stuff should stay as far away
as possible from virtual servers :-).
If I look at summaries of test failures, there are some tests which
consistently fail on virtual machines, yet never fail on real hardware.
I have very deep suspicions about virtual machine reliability.