Parallella Community

Hi,
I wonder if there is any plan to port `Xen` (http://www.xenproject.org/) over onto Parallella? This may be one of (many) things that I will try once I got the board. This would open the doors to OSs.

All the best,
Steven

There are no plans to do so, however you are welcome to give it a whirl.

!?!?

That's so wrong I can't even explain ...

What? I think looking at the docs make it quite clear whether or not it's possible and this applies to anything.

Yep, Parallella is the polar opposite of a virtualisable system. In the latter case the problem is lots of server instances that are mostly idle (legacy of Windows NT server deployment practices - to keep it stable each function had to run on its own box). So buy one big box and consolidate them onto it as VMs. Saves loads of server room space and power.

In the case of Parallella it is a tiny device meant to do a lot of calculations at the same time, and very cheaply too. No space/power or "server sprawl" problems, hence no value in virtualisation support. In the case of Parallella the more interesting question is how many of them can on hook together to solve a single problem, rather than how many ways can one divide a single Parallella.

If you do want to play with virtualisation, the best way is with a secondhand server that supports KVM (noisy, though!).