[NTLUG:Discuss] If not VMWare 2.x or UML...then what?

[Robert Pearson]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 1:58 PM, Richard <ntlug at rain4us.net> wrote:
> Well, I've about had it with VMWare Server 2.x.  The stability is not
> there, the bugs are too numerous and managing the blasted thing via an
> http browser is painfully slow.
>
> UML is great for virtualizing linux, but what if one wanted to
> virtualize a Redmond OS?
>
>
> So, what are viable options that one can put into production?   What are
> the benefits, limitations, gotchas?
>
> I need to find something else.  I'm not liking where VMWare is going.
>
> --
> Richard
>

This is from another mailing list...
[-Disclaimer-]
This post is for information sharing only.
I did not write any of these posts and I have not installed or used
this product personally.
The product may or may not be appropriate for this problem.

[Original post]
There have been a few threads in the past month dealing with various
virtual environments, including Citrix and Suse Xen, KVM and VMware. I
went searching through recent xxxlug email archives and I don't think
anyone's mentioned proxmox. I'm testing this debian-based distro now
and it is super easy - especially if you are like me used to
installing kvm and configuring the libvirt xml files from the command
line on Ubuntu.  The proxmox install is a breeze and proxmox website
has videos on how to do lots of things. Some of the features are
web-based access, live migration, master-node based multi-server
coordination, automatic setup of LVM files and backups. The distro
offers OpenVZ as the virtualization platform for non-windows os, which
has 2-3% degradation when compared to a native install. Windows
operating systems are fully virtualized and do run slower.  Proxmox
made using these feature easy compared to working with virt-manager on
Ubuntu or CentOS. I wonder why I hadn't heard of proxmox before?  The
maintainers are in Austria, so maybe  google localized my searches to
the US and I never got past the first few pages or I kept using wrong
keywords. A couple links follow:

Video Tutorials
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Category:Video_Tutorials

Main Page
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Main_Page


[Post 2]
>> looks interesting, like an open source version of VMware.  KVM with a gui?

There are two virtual technologies involved and you pick which one you
want to use on a new VM creation. One virtualization type is Open VZ
and the other is KVM - which is full virtualization. I've been
experimenting with the KVM side and last night on my i7, I installed
Ubuntu 9.04 desktop as a Virtual Machine and the install significantly
less time than a regular install on hardware. I'm using proxmox 1.4
beta 2, with all the i7 drivers compiled in. Booting the Ubuntu VM
took 5 seconds - tops. I'm going to install windows and see what
happens now.

I'm blown away right now at the speed differences between my two test
machines - both i7s and both using KVM full virtualization.  One i7
has proxmox and the second i7 I had loaded with Ubuntu 9.04 desktop
and sudo apt-get install libvirt kvm and all the needed packaged
programs and then configuring everything from the command-line. The
desktop is using qcow2 non-LVM disk files as the VM storage system
whereas proxmox uses lvm under "raw" format (qcow2 was an option but I
decided to try raw to see what that was about).  Anyway I'm trying to
make sense of the speed differences. I think proxmox was compiled
specifically with speed in mind whereas the desktop version is not.
Also using LVM is significantly faster than file-based vms.

[Post 3]
ok I know I told everyone in a previous post that I wasn't gonna
implement my VM box till December but I had had a wild hair
crawl...well lets just say Proxmox rules! This is so much easier then
trying to implement KVM on top of Ubuntu Server.

Inside of two hours I had a bare-metal install with a virtual samba
server with webmin, a Wordpress server, a Mediawiki server, a Joomla
server, and a Drupal server.

Admin is done from my laptop via firefox and VNC.  Minus's so far is
that there is no PCI passthrough so virtualizing my mythbox is out of
the question till I get a HDHomeRun.

Currently I am trying to figure out how to configure my router
incoming network traffic is routed to the appropriate virtual server.

IMO Proxmox is the F/OSS equivalent of VMware.

Thanks for the recommendation.