My only knowing exposure to Xen prior to taking XCP for a drive was seeing in the yum package lists. :) But XCP does seem to offer a viable platform, but you are right in that in the end what you need it may not provide. But for free, it is nice to see what the Xen guys are trying to do with XCP. I also got to looking at Cloudstack and OpenStack. Promsiing stuff on the horizon. It would be nice to see Red Hat do more with a management layer around KVM-QEmu, and perhaps OpenStack will be that avenue.
I did find a fairly in-depth video made last spring by one of the guys directly involved with Xen and XCP that lays out what they (Xen) have in mind for it: http://vimeo.com/38636349 Good and interesting stuff. Nice to have such FOSS options evolving in this arena. Mark From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chris McQuistion Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2012 12:45 PM To: nlug-talk Subject: Re: [nlug] anyone else here using/tried/considered Xen Cloud Platform? 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] <mailto:nlug-talk%[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 -- 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
