My personal opinion is that vSphere is dominant, but mainly because I'm familiar with it and it's proven in our environment (we run 150+ hosts). Getting all of the 'enterprise' features is not cheap. We also run Hyper-V on an even larger number of hosts and it seems to work well. If I was to look at an alternative for personal or small business use, I would probably look at oVirt or Xenserver.
If the OP is looking at 1-2 hosts and no HA/live migration (no matter what the hypervisor), the best (eg, cheapest and fastest) choice is probably to stick with local storage. On Wed, Dec 30, 2015 at 9:46 AM, Mike Hammett <[email protected]> wrote: > I think Windows shops primarily use vSphere and Hyper-V (I know others can > be used, but they aren't the majority). Linux shops use ESXi and {insert > one of dozens of other virtualization systems here}. I use ProxMox and > vSphere. ProxMox 4 moved from OpenVZ to LXC, which is supported in > mainstream kernels vs. using an ancient kernel. Oddly enough, I went from > OpenVZ to Proxmox several years ago (eight?) around version 1. I went to > vSphere four or five years ago and lately I've added ProxMox back into the > mix (though not primary). > > > I'm a fan of auto-tiered storage. Big (compared to all flash), cheap > (well, relative to all flash) and fast (compared to spinning disks). > > > > ----- > Mike Hammett > Intelligent Computing Solutions > http://www.ics-il.com > > <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL> > <https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb> > <https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions> > <https://twitter.com/ICSIL> > > Midwest Internet Exchange > http://www.midwest-ix.com > > <https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix> > <https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange> > <https://twitter.com/mdwestix> > ------------------------------ > *From: *"Paul Stewart" <[email protected]> > *To: *[email protected] > *Sent: *Wednesday, December 30, 2015 8:22:24 AM > > *Subject: *Re: [AFMUG] VMWare Etc > > Interesting views… and in my opinion they are all correct to some degree. > What I mean, and was mentioned at some point, is that everyone has > different requirements. > > > > Our requirements center around scaling (something that Ryan is pointing > out here) where for his needs and budget ESXi is the best choice possibly. > Support would be nice option to have for us but much less important as we > have expertise on staff. The other extremely important thing for us is > redundancy and fault tolerance. At the extreme, we can accept a few > seconds of node downtime should a hardware failure occur – this sets pretty > aggressive demands on a virtualized environment in my opinion. Then we are > into some of the more obvious stuff regarding multiple OS support, > centralized management, backup strategy etc > > > > For storage design, there are several approaches from slow and bulky > storage right up to super fast, extreme IOPS storage for high transactional > rates. > > > > Most of our current expertise lies in Hyper-V and Proxmox. The Hyper-V > environment will remain untouched (mostly used in development environment) > but our Proxmox environment will be slowly migrated to Citrix Xen Server > (open source). Some of the folks involved took a look at a Citrix Xen > Server and felt the learning curve was very minimal > > > > > > > > > > > > *From:* Af [mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Ryan Ray > *Sent:* Tuesday, December 29, 2015 3:14 PM > *To:* [email protected] > *Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] VMWare Etc > > > > If you think you are going to spend more time learning ESXi vs any other > product I think you'll be surprised. > > > > The rest of those things like dedupe, compression, design storage etc > apply to any virtualization in general and has nothing to do with the > product you use. > > > > Just to give a frame of reference I manage about 100 ESXi nodes, 8 > vCenters across 4 data centers almost 20TB of ram in everything. On top of > that we run a 2000 seat VDI environment using View. The time I've spent > with Prox, Xen, Hyper-v has always lead me back to VMware as long as you > have the money. > > > > On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 12:08 PM, Josh Reynolds <[email protected]> > wrote: > > You make this statement like there aren't things to learn about > non-open-source products, which is a pretty silly argument IMO. > > Knowing when to dedupe, what compression to use, design storage > strategy, optimizing IO for throughput vs latency vs price, vs bulk > storage, best performance settings for different types of hosts / > services... similar things to learn between products. > > > On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 2:03 PM, Ryan Ray <[email protected]> wrote: > > See, this is always my problem when these types of threads come up. Sure, > > Xen is free, as long as you spend the hours and hours it takes to learn > the > > system and maintain it. Your time isn't free. I don't know how much time > you > > have to dink around with your hypervisor but my time can definitely be > > better spent anywhere else. Large companies use this technology because > with > > their team of engineers on staff to maintain and evolve it it gets them > the > > flexibility they need to run their services. Your small business running > 6 > > vm's doesn't need this. > > > > > > On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 8:29 PM, Eric Kuhnke <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> > >> This is just my opinion: Disregard VMWare and use a Linux based > hypervisor > >> with Xen. You can use either PV (paravirtualized) or HVM (hardware > >> virtualized) guests on the same hypervisor. > >> > >> My typical hypervisor setup is Debian Jessie AMD64 and the latest Xen. > >> > >> Xen is what powers Amazon EC2 and a bunch of other services. It has a > >> learning curve but is very much worth it. Everything is free, whether > GPL, > >> Apache or BSD licensed. > >> > >> On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 1:47 PM, Matt <[email protected]> > wrote: > >>> > >>> Is there a free version of VMWare? What are limitations vs paid? How > >>> do you manage containers? Does it support software raid? Does it > >>> have scheduled backup capabilities? How does it compare to Proxmox? > >>> > >>> I have a few linux centos servers: directadmin, email, DNS, speedtest, > >>> mysql database and box running lots of perl scripts to monitor my > >>> network. Would like to move them all to data center on one box and a > >>> second box there to shove backups on. > >> > >> > > > > > >
