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Suggestion on virtualization platforms?
danielfeng
Member
We will be getting a new server for our own projects. Xeon E3-1240/16GB RAM/500GB*2 software RAID 1. We'd like to create several guests for individual services. Our tech support recommends VMware ESXi as it's easy to use and also free, but it's up to us. Our company is using paid VMware ESX on clusters and free ESXi on other servers.
I am comfortable with VPS guests but had no experience managing a host. Any suggestion on choosing among Xen, KVM and VMware? Thanks.
Comments
Not considering OpenVZ? Would be lower overhead than the other options.
If you projects involve Windows and BSDs, then use Xen or KVM ... KVM is quite a new vt so there arent really many easy or out of the box guide if u dont use a panel. While Xen you can manage it easily Via Xen Center if you are using Windows on ur machine.
The only problem is that OpenVZ doesn't like Arch too much.
And is Xen Center also free? How about VMware then? I feel that VMware is the most expensive option in VPS market, but not quite sure. Our tech said KVM Virtio gave him headache.
If you entire infrastructure is already VMWare I would stick to it.
Indeed. If you need Arch, KVM is a good choice. Any specific reason you need/want to use Arch though?
I always though kvm is the easiest, for me at home it even easier than setting up virtualbox.
@danielfeng yes xen center is free for use. There is commercial version if you need some of the commercial features but what it has is definitely enough as a free version. I manage my office virtualizations through xen center mainly. But if you are looking to sell service, then u need platforms like SolusVM etc.
Looks like VMware does not support software RAID on host. May try KVM then.
Actually the server has on-board RAID controller but the driver is only available for Windows. So for Linux host we will still have to use software RAID.
Get a raid card your data will thank you
Definitely go with a proper raid card; also, stick with vmware if that's what you've been using; it's rock solid.
If you will own all the guest operating systems then ESXi is the way forward. Very simple to manage and has very little overhead (especially looking at the spec of the server you plan on using)
You can find very cheap raid cards which are on the VMware Hardware Compatibility list. In my opinion a Raid card with battery backed write cache is a must for getting any sort of performance out of a multi-tenanted host being used for virtualisation.
However depending on your IO workload you may get away with software raid using an alternative to ESXi, but for the cost is it really worth the risk?