the time I spend maintaining our local xen server pair (primary and hot standby) falls under the category of "keeping general linux sysadmin skills sharp". Everything xen does with how it is administered, secured, updated and monitored on a linux hypervisor (and linux domU guests) is directly translatable to the skills needed on a day-to-day basis to claim competence in our field. several hours spent by a colleague setting up a new cutting-edge version in a test VM and messing around with it are not wasted, but are productive time. We need to know how to deal with any changes introduced by the change to systemd in debian jessie and stretch, for example. If we didn't host our own Linux based highly-available hypervisor system I'd be embarrassed.
On Tue, Dec 29, 2015 at 12:03 PM, Ryan Ray <[email protected]> wrote: > See, this is always my problem when these types of threads come up. Sure, > Xen is free, as long as you spend the hours and hours it takes to learn the > system and maintain it. Your time isn't free. I don't know how much time > you have to dink around with your hypervisor but my time can definitely be > better spent anywhere else. Large companies use this technology because > with their team of engineers on staff to maintain and evolve it it gets > them the flexibility they need to run their services. Your small business > running 6 vm's doesn't need this. > > > On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 8:29 PM, Eric Kuhnke <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> This is just my opinion: Disregard VMWare and use a Linux based >> hypervisor with Xen. You can use either PV (paravirtualized) or HVM >> (hardware virtualized) guests on the same hypervisor. >> >> My typical hypervisor setup is Debian Jessie AMD64 and the latest Xen. >> >> Xen is what powers Amazon EC2 and a bunch of other services. It has a >> learning curve but is very much worth it. Everything is free, whether GPL, >> Apache or BSD licensed. >> >> On Mon, Dec 28, 2015 at 1:47 PM, Matt <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >>> Is there a free version of VMWare? What are limitations vs paid? How >>> do you manage containers? Does it support software raid? Does it >>> have scheduled backup capabilities? How does it compare to Proxmox? >>> >>> I have a few linux centos servers: directadmin, email, DNS, speedtest, >>> mysql database and box running lots of perl scripts to monitor my >>> network. Would like to move them all to data center on one box and a >>> second box there to shove backups on. >>> >> >> >
