On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 11:27:29 +0000 (+0000), Simon Capstick wrote:
> That's a good comprehensive summary by David. I'll only add our
> experience FWIW...
One more experience story FWIW. Summary - KVM for the adventurous,
VirtualBox (ease of use) or VMware (server for simplicity or ESX(i)
for speed) for less adventurous or those averse to non-GPL.
I'v used xen both at work and home and generally I've been happy with
it. However Xen (host) is stuck at 2.6.18 and recently that's become
a big problem (driver support at home, getting occasional spontaneous
reboots at work).
VMware Server, Virtualbox work the same way - slowly (well, not too
bad TBH).
ESX and ESXi are better, but they aren't paravirtualised, though there
are some drivers for it.
KVM can be paravirtualised and everyone is starting to use it.
Our new dell 2950 (like a 1950 but physically bigger for more disks)
supports hardware virtualisation - however I had to turn it on in the
BIOS (ditto for power management). Hardware RAID card with battery
backed cache (no point unless you have that battery backed cache IMO).
So I've setup half a dozen OS (dapper, etch, rhel4 and solaris 10) on
this over the last week - all worked fine, some are paravirtualised.
I've also moved my 6 Xen domains at home over to KVM, also fine, all
paravirtualised.
Whilst I'm confident that KVM is the way of the future (ubuntu, redhat
(which have bought the developes of KVM)), the management tools are
very rough and immature ATM. virt-manager GUI is almost useless.
There are various gotchas - e.g. using libvirt to manage the domains,
without adding "<feature><acpi/></feature>" to the libvirt XML file a
"graceful" shutdown wasn't (it just forced machine straight off).
I found KVM networking very easy actually - it's just network
bridging. However one thing I miss from Xen is the ability to
passthrough PCI cards to underlying domains (this is being added to
KVM but may depend upon quite rare hardware support).
Adrian
