On 26.01.2014 00:39, John Mancuso wrote:
So, I am planning on setting up a brand new cloud infrastructure
using Cloudstack 4.2 on RHEL6. Cloudstack is hypervisor agnostic- I
got that... However there are some differences and features that are
available on XenServer that are not available on KVM. This is from a
Citrix salesperson:
"Here is some feedback on the following benefits of using Citrix
XenServer over KVM:
1. Recurring Volume Snapshots with delta - Citrix XenServer is the
only hypervisor where recurring snapshots will be deltas (in other
hypervisors every volume snapshot is full) - this provides significant
space savings on secondary storage
2. VM snapshots (taking a snapshot of a VM volumes including
memory state - not possible with KVM which supports only volume
snapshots)
3. Live Storage Migration is only possible on Citrix XenServer
(not supported on KVM)
4. Live CPU and Memory Scaling for running instances (not supported
on KVM)"
On the Redhat side they have made it very clear that while Xen is
still available, KVM is the hypervisor technology they are pushing &
supporting going forward.
On the Apache/Citrix side, I get the feeling that from a QA
perspective CloudStack (and CloudPlatform) is based and tested on
XenServer and would be preferable in a stable & reliable Production
environment.
Hello,
You are mostly correct, those points seem valid and right now Xenserver
is the better supported hypervisor, it is quite mature and with loads of
nice features. I'm seriously considering it myself.
Having said that, many clouds deployed nowadays are on KVM; yes it is
missing some features but it has a huge user base, it's very stable and
the performance is great; for me the killer feature is that I got a
"real" OS as hypervisor, an OS that I have used extensively and am quite
familiar with, for which we have deployment and monitoring infra in
place etc etc. Additionally, if you want to use more exotic stuff, such
as GlusterFS, Ceph or whatever crazy thing (CLVM over multiple mpath
devices?) can run in RHEL/CentOS proper KVM is again the best choice. If
you want VXLAN you are again limited to KVM afaik.
So it kind of depends on your needs, luckily there are good quality
options to satisfy most of them.
HTH
Lucian
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