I spent a few hours with XCP yesterday. All in all, I'd say that it is the slickest and easiest Xen implementation I've ever worked on. I was able to get it up and running and get a few VM's installed within just a couple hours.
I ran into a few show-stopper issues, where XCP just doesn't have the same features/ability as VMware and these were necessary features for what I do. We have the VSphere Essentials Plus package. This package retails for about $4500, but I think real-world pricing is much lower than that (we spent less than half of that.) This gives us license for 3 hosts, up to 6 CPU sockets, vMotion, High Availability, and lots of other features we don't even use. We have 29 production VM's and lots of test VM's, all running on our 3 hosts. After working with virtualization for a few years, I would NEVER go back. If someone is just getting started with Virtualization and has a $0 budget, I would recommend they check our VMware's free version of ESXi or XCP. XCP can do a few things that you can't do with the free version of ESXi (like vMotion). VMware has a few advantages of its own, too, like much broader guest operating system support and support for more than 8 vNICs (both of which were important features for me.) Chris On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Mark J. Bailey <[email protected]> wrote: > http://www.xen.org/products/cloudxen.html**** > > ** ** > > I have used VMware for YEARS (GSX, ESXi 4 now 5). Have always known of Xen > but really never bothered. Of course, Xen lost favor with FOSS (Linus, et. > al.) when Citrix picked up Xensource a few years back. Thus, the new focus > on KVM (which is a promising hypervisor in its own right but (to me) the > management layer ain’t there yet, even with RHEL6 – still looking forward > to it though). But Xen remains huge with cloud players like Amazon.**** > > ** ** > > So, when I saw that Xenserver had a free version, I decided to play with > it. It was nice but restricted like the free ESXi 5. But I caught sight of > Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) which repackaged free Xenserver but with many > enterprise features rolled back in. With the recent 1.6 release of XCP, > some pretty darn important enterprise stuff was included. In particular > Xenmotion grabbed my attention (since the equiv in VMware, vMotion, comes > only with the $5K+ packaging). I know all this has always been at the pure > Xen level, but I have a lot on my plate, and need customers to be > self-sufficient, so a good management layer like XenCenter (or vSphere) is > a must.**** > > ** ** > > Correct me please, but in practice, XCP 1.6 is doing a pretty damn good > job for me so far. I have one client with 20 VDIs on an XCP 1.6 server and > it is, so far, doing well. Am I missing something? And, Citrix seems to be > doing a decent job of trying to be a good FOSS corpizen, so is there some > reason to spend $5K+ for VMware Essentials Plus over free XCP? I know there > are subtle differences in the way ESXi and Xen hypervisors implement > virtualization, etc. And, some scenarios (like high I/O of heavy RDBMS > apps) will kill VMWare the same as Xen too. But if XCP/Xen get the job done > for $0K (both not withstanding my $ time), is there some reason I should > only do VMware? I think Citrix+Xenserver/Xen/KVM/and even Hyper-V 3 (yeah, > I know, M$) are going to prove to be game changers for the market dominance > VMware has enjoyed up til now (in cost-benefit if nothing else). **** > > ** ** > > Thoughts?**** > > ** ** > > Mark**** > > ** ** > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "NLUG" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en
