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

[Robert Parkhurst]

Ah, thanks for the correction!  And sorry about that earlier, I don't know
what I was thinking.



On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Fred Berean <fred at bereanservices.com>wrote:

> 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
> >>
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> >
>
>
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