[NTLUG:Discuss] Lastest on Virtualization - Xen, VMWare or Microsoft - which to choose

[Fred Berean]

One important correction regarding Xen - There is abolutely *no* problem 
installing non-windows VM's on Xen. For their free commercial version 
(Xen Server Express) and non-free enterprise versions they have several 
pre-built images for Debian, Redhat, Suse, Centos, etc which have been 
available forever.  In fact, I just installed the latest Xen image for 
Openfiler, an Rpath based file server solution, on a customers server 
last weekend. 

However, what you are probably thinking about is that the graphical Xen 
VM management tool called "Xen Center" currently requires that it be 
from a Windows machine. This is because some dummy wrote their latest 
version as a .net application, and mono doesn't quite appear to be ready 
for it.  For me that is a bit of a hassle, but the rumor mills also seem 
to be indicating their return to a web-managed console tool.

There are a few other hardware limitations on the device support, as 
well as a requirement (as of version 4) that the server be 64-bit.  All 
told, I'm very pleased with the performance and simplicity of the 
solution, albeit nothing is perfect.

My $0.02.  As always, ymmv..

-Fred H.-


Robert Parkhurst wrote:
> What is this for exactly?
>
> I've used Xen, VMware and VirtualBox (somewhat)...
>
> We looked into a VM solution for servers a year or so ago and looked at Xen
> and VMware.  VMware is really good but is expensive..  With VMware though
> you can do lots of really cool things like doing fail-over and all of that,
> but you need the money for the hardware and for licensing of VMware.  It's
> got USB 2 passthrough as well so you can pass devices like external DVD
> burners, Blackberries, etc.
>
> Xen was cheaper and was more friendly towards lower-end hardware (i.e.
> non-Intel Gigabit NIC's, non-SAS/SCSI RAIDs, etc.) but anything less than
> their "enterprise" package meant you could only run Windows VM's (which
> irritated me a bit).  I don't remember a lot of tech specs on it...I do
> remember though being "irritated" that it was a Linux solution, that ran on
> Linux, but unless you paid them for the "enterprise" edition you only got to
> run Windows VM's.
>
> VirtualBox is nice and 2.x series offers some good stuff..  What I didn't
> like about it (on the Linux side at least) was that it didn't automatically
> make bridging devices so VM's can't easily just connect to each other.
> VirtualBox has the least amount of functions, I think, right now for the
> server level--it doesn't have HA and whatnot, but for the workstation I
> really liked it.  It seemed to have less memory overhead than any of the
> deskside VMware products.
>
> There's also the free VMware Server (now at version 2)...It doesn't have all
> the features of the paid-for version (obviously), but it's pretty good..
> Version 2 offers USB 2 passthrough (1.x did not) and you can run multiple
> VM's and everything.  I've used it to host my Windows 2003 "workstation"
> instance on my Ubuntu 8.04 Linux box doing mostly Blackberry syncing and
> application uploading.
>
>
> For the server, if you have the money, I'd prefer to have the paid-for
> version of VMware because it's memory overhead is very low as it runs on a
> striped down version of RedHat Enterprise and you've got features like HA
> failover between VMware nodes and such.  The downside is that the management
> tool runs on Windows...but you can always "fix" that with RDesktop...
>
>
>
>
> Hope that helps!
>
>
>
> Robert
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 2:16 PM, Lee Doran <LDoran at goccs.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> So the hot topic of last part of this year - what VM solution to choose,
>> who has the best feature set, whats the best priced, and so on.
>>
>>
>>
>> What is this groups feelings about the Various Virtualization options
>> out there?
>>
>>
>>
>> Lee
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>
>>     
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