Linux VM's on an hp rx2620 (Itanium)?

[Christian Deutsch_1]

Hi folks,

anyone out there using hp-supported Linux VM's on an hp rx2620 (Itanium) system? or know someone who does? and for how long now? my system has 6GB RAM and 3x70GB disks.

helpful answers will be rewarded with points of course :-)

thanks, Christian

[rick jones]

Do you mean running Linux as a client/guest OS under the HP Integrity Virtual Machine?

[Christian Deutsch_1]

Dear Rick,

Thanks for responding, I really appreciate it!

I don't mind if "physical" OS on the rx2620 is HP-UX or Linux. But I want to be able to host at least 2 virtual Linux VM's on the rx2620.

From what I know so far (please correct me if I'm wrong):

HP-UX 11.23 as "physical" OS: only HP-UX VM's are possible. Theoretically Linux could be possible in the future, but it is uncertain if this will even be possible in 2007.

SLES or RHEL as "physical" OS: VMWare is not sold so far for Integrity, so no possibility to use VMWare. Don't know when this might be possible in the future. Don't know about other possibilities to get VM's running under SLES or RHEL. I heard about a product called "Virtuozzo" that is theoretically able to get the Linux VM's for me but I don't know how good this product is.

My problem is basically: my department purchased an rx2620 with 6GB RAM for me as a "development system" and I want to run my "most intensively used" programs (email and web browser) on my development machine. However, Thunderbird "from HP" (even version 1.5.0.5) has too many bugs, as soon as I send the second email, the program dumps core. Firefox on the other hand runs very well indeed. And I couldn't find any possibility so far to get the thunderbird bugs fixed quickly. As I am not highly dependent on HP-UX, even though I have been working with HP-UX for 14 years and really like the OS, it seems to me that Linux is the way to go. I don't have much hope at all that the Thunderbird situation will improve. If there is no "good" way for me to run more than 1 Linux OS on the rx2620 I am even prepared to give away the rx2620 and use a ProLiant instead or something along those lines.

Now you understand better?

[rick jones]

Indeed, HP Integrity VM is the primary vitualization solution for Itanium. The "hypervisor" OS is indeed HP-UX. I'm not sure myself what the timeframes are for "Linux" being "supported" (ITRC or Web search for "supported HPite works" and you'll probably find my missive on supported vs works)

WRT Thunderbird on UX... I happen to run the 1.7ish Mozilla on my 11.11 workstation. Email seems to be OK although I cannot toggle the "View" menu to show read vs unread. I wouldn't worry too much about running a "from HP" thuderbird/browser/etc for HP-UX, going with later and greater bits from the main source is probably just as good if not better in this case.

There is another VM out there with Itanium support - that is Xen - it is, initially at least targetted towards Linux, and the Linux kernel is the basis for the "hypervisor." They have IIRC plans for supporting other OSes as guests but I'm not sure when/if HP-UX would be supported for that.

At present I suspect that booting a Linux Guest on HP IVM would be the better way to go than trying to boot an HP-UX guest on Xen.

For the email and browser bit, you might ask around in another of the ITRC Forums and/or netnews in comp.sys.hp.hpux to find folks who may have solved the specific problem you have encountered.