So you touched on something here I wanted to highlight … in Enterprise environments I would suggest the VmWare dominates by a significant amount. But in SP environments I don’t see much of it – definitely a lot of Xen (Citrix Xen Server to be specific). By SP I’m also including cloud providers – not just access providers.
For small SP operations there is often very little difference between enterprise vs SP requirements – not saying that’s wrong or anything. For mid sized to extremely large SP’s , then the requirements and deployment models are often quite different. From: Af [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Josh Baird Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2015 10:15 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] VMWare Etc 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] <mailto:[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] <mailto:[email protected]> > To: [email protected] <mailto:[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] <mailto:[email protected]> ] On Behalf Of Ryan Ray Sent: Tuesday, December 29, 2015 3:14 PM To: [email protected] <mailto:[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] <mailto:[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] <mailto:[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] > <mailto:[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] >> <mailto:[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. >> >> >
