Sridhar Dhanapalan <srid...@dhanapalan.com> writes:
> 2009/3/18 Mark Walkom <markwal...@gmail.com>:
>
>> Well XenServer 5 would do it, but it's not FOSS.
>> Virtualbox *might* if it's Solaris 10 (I haven't gotten 9 working yet),
>> pretty sure the others will work - Windows will and I find it faster on my
>> laptop than on bare metal.
>
> Yes, it's Solaris 10. I was under the impression that Virtualbox was
> focused more on desktop virtualisation and is less geared for servers.
> Is that incorrect?
>
>> Xen is pretty powerful, but there is still a lack of good, solid management
>> tools that cover HA, iSCSI integration, replication, migration etc etc.
>
> A lack of good management tools is what concerns me.
Your choices, then, are buy something or buy something; none of the free
options have much by way of admin tools, and nothing much better than
VMware.
> I want to get productive quickly and not have to spend unnecessary
> time setting up and managing. I don't need zillions of features, but I
> do want something that's solid and easy to use.
KVM with libvirt does a respectable job, and is the preferred solution
for RH these days. It also has good support on Ubuntu (preferred
solution), Debian and SuSE.
Plus, as you noted earlier, KVM takes a good approach to the issues
around virtualization, although it does require sufficiently advanced
hardware — VMX or SVM support on the CPU. It can, now, also take
advantage of things like PCIe virtualization hardware to pass directly
through hardware.
The weakest point for it is paravirtualized drivers for non-free
operating systems, of which there are basically zero good choices.
The e1000 NIC emulation, however, is pretty robust, and generally
performs pretty close to a PV solution.
Finally, libvirt will also manage Xen and, in theory[1], other
virtualization tools, so if you introduced Xen or whatever it could be
managed the same way.
Anyway, I currently use KVM and VMWare Server 2, and would vastly prefer
the former everywhere — even though it has been more of a pain to
manage, in some ways, than the VMWare product.
It required manual XML configuration file editing, or other low level
bypassing the GUI, but at least it didn't incomprehensibly stop working
until completely removed (by hand) and reinstalled, unlike VMWare.
Twice.
Regards,
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] ...as in, I don't believe it talks to anything else, but it could
if someone wrote the code to integrate it.
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