I've been using KVM with Rhel 6.4 and VCL in a test environment and it has been completely reliable, as in no crashes or performance degradation thus far. However, it has not been heavily loaded yet. On a purely subjective note I've been impressed with it - it seems very smooth. I haven't tried much in the way of image conversion. I did find getting to grips with virt-install/virt-manager/virsh/qemu etc rather confusing at first but it becomes much clearer with use.
VCL has had no issues with a lot of configuration changes on the Host (I've completely changed the VM working directory a couple of times), as long as the 'VM Host Profiles' information is correct it copes with it just fine. From: Dmitri Chebotarov [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, July 08, 2013 4:15 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: VMware vs. KVM on VCL Hi Mike I've been using VMWARE and KVM in the same VCL environment for little over a month. While VCL can convert from VMDK to QCOW2 I choose to have dedicated KVM images in qcow2 format. The main reason for it is to have virtio drivers installed in VM for better OS performance. Also I couldn't get the KVM->VMWARE conversion to work - qemu-img creates image which ESXi doesn't recognize. I'm using RedHat 6.3/4 as KVM host OS. Also tried CentOS 6.3/4 before. This could be related to hardware I have (IBM HS22 blades), but RedHat runs better in my case. I've experienced unexpected reboots with CentOS. I haven't tried Fedora in production. KVM works very well so far. Looks like it creates/loads VMs faster on the same hardware/storage compared to ESXi 4.1. I haven't had any KVM related issues with VCL. I hope it helps. Thanks. ________________________________ From: Waldron, Michael H [[email protected]] Sent: Monday, July 08, 2013 3:31 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: VMware vs. KVM on VCL I'm curious to hear about people's experiences/opinions with VMware and KVM on VCL. Up to this point, we have been using the free version of VMware ESXi, but I've done some testing with KVM, and it seems to work well also. It looks like the two will co-exist well, as KVM successfully converts the vmdk images to qcow2 format on the fly, and will even convert new images created on KVM back to vmdk format if the repository is defined as vmdk format. So I'm toying with the idea of migrating away from VMware and going to KVM, and wanted to hear about others experiences if they've done the same, or can compare performance between the two hypervisors. Also, if you are using KVM, what OS are you running it on. The testing I did was with KVM running on Fedora 16. Thanks, Mike Mike Waldron Systems Specialist ITS - Research Computing Center University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
