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How does VMWare differ to KVM?
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How does VMWare differ to KVM?

Hi,

I understand the differences between OpenVZ and KVM but i'm not sure how KVM would differ to another platform like VMWare. Any key differences to be aware of ?

Comments

  • From a guest point of view just the drivers.

    CPU sharing and network routing could differ slightly in performance, but Linux (KVM) allows for a lot more tweaking.

    KVM is fully open source and has many open source software around it (including kernel, open stack, etc).

    VMWare is a commercial product and doesn't allow for much flexibility. You can't run software raid for example, only fake (motherboard) raid or hardware.

    The virtualization is a lot a like, but the management / platform is fundamentally different, with VMWare being more out-of-the-box solution but also limited to that.

    Thanked by 1GM2015
  • I used to use VMware ESXi with some other VMware products in my server setup. It was nice but like classy said its commercial and trying to convert your VMs in VMware to something that runs KVM is not an easy task.

  • @classy - Thanks. So in terms of resources it's more guaranteed like KVM and doesn't have so much overselling / the ability to impact on neighbors as OpenVZ does?

  • @CFarence - Thanks - I hadn't even considered migrating, but seeing as it's for personal use it shouldn't be a problem.

  • @jeromeza said:
    CFarence - Thanks - I hadn't even considered migrating, but seeing as it's for personal use it shouldn't be a problem.

    That's what I thought until I wanted to rent a dedicated server to host backups, some apps I need always up, etc.. So I had my home servers running VMware and my rented servers running proxmox. I just found it easier to run proxmox on everything, that way I can move things around freely. It's just something to watch for.

    After using both I would recommend Proxmox, you get the best of both worlds, KVM and LXC.. Plus a nice web interface, the free ESXi the last time I used it you needed the client on every computer which got annoying.

  • @jeromeza said:
    classy - Thanks. So in terms of resources it's more guaranteed like KVM and doesn't have so much overselling / the ability to impact on neighbors as OpenVZ does?

    VMWare is really easy to oversell, at some point it was its major selling point (VMWare has even been used to cram more openvz boxes on a node using slabbing)

    The tools / APIs for VMWare are not very easy to use because they're not really open about it (obviously).

    KVM is just a command you enter in your terminal or let libvirt take care of. So you can easily build your own API (or use libvirt).

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