New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Poll : OpenVZ, Xen, KVM, Vmware, Xenserver
gestiondbi
Member, Patron Provider
Hello everyone!
I'd like your opinion on your favorite virtualization technology.
From my side, I especially love OpenVZ for its ease of use and power, and XenServer for its great stability and support.
What do you think?
- Edit : Correct the typo
Thanked by 1flrichar
Virtualization poll
- Which virtualization method do you prefer?81 votes
- OpenVZ32.10%
- Xen20.99%
- KVM35.80%
- VMware  4.94%
- Citrix XenServer  6.17%
Comments
Depends on your needs really. If you want dedicated resources, then KVM might be an option...
OpenVZ has the best perfomance (for gameservers etc. etc.). No brain, no pain - No kernel, no problem.
Agree with @premiumN
I've seen way too much overselling and some invasive actions to my privacy with providers of OpenVZ. Thusly, I will never use OpenVZ. I have been slowly switching to XEN and KVM due to the higher security and the difficulty of overselling.
If it's a trusted provider and I have no need for any special kernel manipulation etc then OVZ. Above that Xen or KVM, for my limited technical prowess I don't really have a preference between the two other than I feel that KVM is where it's heading.
VMware & XEN are both superb but I prefer KVM because of its out of box kernel support & from where things are heading I think we are going to see more of KVM than any other virtualization sometime in future not far away.
OpenVZ was designed for mass overselling & does it job very well at that. It is not even virtualization but containerization.It is mostly because of OpenVZ that we see hosts trying to compete on prices rather than quality of service.I hope it just dies because that would do a great favor to honest hosts & hosting industry in general.
Really. Proof?
I understand that some people hate OpenVZ. But it's proved, that OpenVZ's VPS are "faster" and the perfomance is better, because they don't have an own kernel etc. As I said, No brain, no pain - No kernel, no problem. It's good for gameserver hosting or whatever. I prefer OpenVZ over KVM/Xen whatever too if it comes to gamehosting etc. If you need special kernel modules/your own kernel or you just want your "own" OS/server then go with KVM/Xen/VMWare whatever.
I too, prefer KVM over the rest. I'ved worked with all of them except for maybe OpenVZ. I wonder how ovz compares to something like lxc or even docker, performance-wise.
I would love to provide some sort of container product, perhaps based on docker. [Edit]: Though not for purposes of overselling. I would structure the containers like one would do with kvm guests or xen domains.
The image is directly from Parallels website.
Pretty much the first & most important feature mentioned on Parallels website to attract providers is "Run 300% more servers on same hardware & increase profit" In other words it is called Overselling.
Other than that when VZ came into existence, servers used to have very less RAM & HDD so they designed it so that providers can deliver "Many times more servers than normal"
The image is directly from Parallels website.
@K2Bytes - so by your logic because it can be oversold it must be? I could point out plenty providers overselling Xen and KVM services so how is that different.
Don't blame Openvz, blame the people that "choose" to oversell it.
On my buisness, we do not oversell. Yeah, maybe we will make more money, but we will also loose a lot of customers. We choose the quality part than the profit part.
But I understand you, I know many provider that oversell.
Overselling is not a bad thing, done right it's an efficient way of utilizing the servers full potential without it affecting individual client performance as well as increasing profitability at the same time.
But it requires an experienced, skilled person to do it right, not someone who decided yesterday to give the VPS business a go.
It really depends on what you need as end user. KVM / Xen has better isolation over other VM's.
Nope it is because they advertise it as main feature & have been since the launch of those containers so if course it means they made it specifically for this purpose.Tell me one thing if they somehow disable this overselling feature in their next release, would hosts still be using it? The answer is NO & you know it.
Only other quality of OpenVZ which attracts new providers or less familiar with technicalities of linux is that you just install Solus(or get someone to installit for you), click & its done.In simple words no techncial knowledge is required to become an OpenVZ provider whereas this is not the case with XEN & KVM.
In other virtualizations you can do ballooning to oversell RAM but it is still not overselling as you cannot oversell beyond physical limits of the server.But with simple command you can know if your provider is using ballooning feature or not.Thin provisioning lets you oversell HDD space on XEN & KVM but you got to do it manually as SolusVM does not support it.
In simple words there is a strict limit on overselling in other virtualizations but in OpenVZ it is just a child's play to oversell upto 8X of real capacity of the node easily.
If OpenVZ is not meant to be for overselling beyond imagination only then kill its overselling feature in next release then I would see how many use it & offer unrealistically priced servers ruining the fun for those who want to run an honestly priced business providing good services.
What you said is true but there would be only 0.1% providers who do it in the right way.
Ok, so you answered my question. Your logic is that because you can oversell everyone is doing it. That was all.
Not everyone but majority does it in the way I explained.There are only a handful number of hosts for example Prometeus & Ramnode whom I can trust that even if they are overselling they would do it in the right way without compromising on performance.
Can you explain how offering any of the following plans is sustainable without crazy 8X overselling?
http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/23276/buf-dal-la-chi-gvh-mid-march-deals-starting-9-year-250gb-ssd-cached-disk-10tb-50cips-xen-ovz/p1
Offers like these spoil the mindset of whoever is getting his first vps or does not know what good quality service is.
It's not, but again, that is the choice of the provider to do that and the stupidity of the customer to buy it, still not the fault of the software.
Exactly !
I'm very much in agreement with you on this with the exception of the customer part. Customers shouldn't be classified as stupid for planning to run a gameserver and having the knowledge to know that OpenVZ is better for performance. I believe the full fault is at the provider for overselling and deliberately "bottlenecking" customers just to make another quick buck.
In majority of the world, not only killing but keeping guns is also a crime
Jokes aside you are right but wouldn't it be the best for everyone if there is no overselling feature in OpenVZ & we see providers competing on quality rather than pricing?
When you talk about money, nothing is easy.
Ok, however this is LET it's about competing on price in the main so this probably not the best place to be looking at quality over price where it really is 90% OVZ.
Overselling created the LET market and it's really not such a bad place if you know it well enough to make the right decisions.
@Pwner - If any customer is going to use an unmanaged VPS then they need to take the time to understand what they are buying and what the differences are. But in the main as we all know people buy according to price and nothing else. So from that point of view, yes stupid fits them well.
I couldn't disagree with you more. I currently run about 15 game servers (Quake 2) across Europe and the US. I've tried every type of virtualization and OpenVZ has been a total failure 99% of the time. Sure it might be faster, I agree with you there, but we all know it tends to get oversold and there just isn't enough CPU for the game leading to lag and bad playing conditions. I currently only have 1 OpenVZ game server in Germany with WeLoveServers, the rest are all KVM and a few Xen.
Hi so for example I have a dedicated server Dual L5520 and would like to split it into say 8 vCpu each for own use then OpenVZ would be the easiest way? Would the resources be evenly split 8vCpu/8vCpu ?
Resource are split however you want, you can let all VPS access all cores or limit it to 1 core and so on. How you split the resources on each VPS is your choice.
That's actually wrong and a misunderstanding of what we're talking about when discussing memory in a technical fashion. You can oversell RAM on a balloon system. Let's say we have two users, Sally and Bob. Each have been sold 6GB on a 8GB system. Sally is a hardcore DBA and runs Postgres with 5GB locked in memory pools. Bob runs a wannabe wordpress site and only uses 1GB max. Bob's VM's balloon driver will expand to 4GB. If for some reason, Bob's site starts to take off, the balloon stays and he starts swapping. It's the same performance profile as ovz vswap.
When we say the memory is not overcommitted in the xen and kvm docs, we merely mean that there's only a single backing page for any allocation - which is still technically true in the example above. The mapped physical memory is still 8GB as 4GB sits in the balloon. In the end, tl;dr is that it's a slight technical nuance which doesn't mean what you think it means.
The 300% is pretty much the virtualization industry's standard ROI marketing bullet point thanks to this study
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/TCO.pdf
You'll be hard pressed to find anyone tooting less than 300%.