Of all the cloud deployments we have been involved with (and that's a lot) XenServer has been the most popular Hypervisor by far. A number of deployments were planning on using KVM but switched to XenServer after initial testing for one reason or another.
KVM is being used, and where it's a good fit it's a perfectly viable Hypervisor, especially when the organisation has KVM skills already in place. As Shanker says, deploying a cloud with multiple hypervisors is a common approach, ensuring you get the best of both worlds. Regards Geoff Higginbottom CTO / Cloud Architect D: +44 20 3603 0542<tel:+442036030542> | S: +44 20 3603 0540<tel:+442036030540> | M: +447968161581<tel:+447968161581> geoff.higginbot...@shapeblue.com<mailto:geoff.higginbot...@shapeblue.com> | www.shapeblue.com<htp://www.shapeblue.com/> ShapeBlue Ltd, 53 Chandos Place, Covent Garden, London, WC2N 4HS<x-apple-data-detectors://37> On 26 Jan 2014, at 03:53, "Shanker Balan" <shanker.ba...@shapeblue.com<mailto:shanker.ba...@shapeblue.com>> wrote: Comments inline. On 26-Jan-2014, at 8:35 am, Nux! <n...@li.nux.ro<mailto:n...@li.nux.ro>> wrote: 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. What I personally find most relevant for choosing a hypervisor is guest OS support. Not all hypervisors are created equal when it comes to supporting a wide mix of operating systems. Given that XenServer and KVM are both open source, I would recommend running both. It gives you OS flexibility and spreads risks. If you can afford, add VMware also. Enterprises love VMware. Regards. -- @shankerbalan M: +91 98860 60539 | O: +91 (80) 67935867 shanker.ba...@shapeblue.com<mailto:shanker.ba...@shapeblue.com> | www.shapeblue.com<http://www.shapeblue.com> | Twitter:@shapeblue ShapeBlue Services India LLP, 22nd floor, Unit 2201A, World Trade Centre, Bangalore - 560 055 Need Enterprise Grade Support for Apache CloudStack? Our CloudStack Infrastructure Support<http://shapeblue.com/cloudstack-infrastructure-support/> offers the best 24/7 SLA for CloudStack Environments. Apache CloudStack Bootcamp training courses **NEW!** CloudStack 4.2.1 training<http://shapeblue.com/cloudstack-training/> 18th-19th February 2014, Brazil. Classroom<http://shapeblue.com/cloudstack-training/> 17th-23rd March 2014, Region A. Instructor led, On-line<http://shapeblue.com/cloudstack-training/> 24th-28th March 2014, Region B. 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