Re: [CentOS] Centos 7.5 on Vmware

2018-07-02 Thread Leroy Tennison
I agree with Nataraj about kvm/qemu/libvirt, we have 10+ hypervisors running it 
and it meets our needs but none of them are particularly heavily loaded.  The 
only caution I would give is that there are occasions (mainly in the 
snapshot-associated arena) where the man page may simply say "do this" but, 
when you run the command on a distribution focusing on longer term support, you 
find it's not yet supported.  And there are areas where Red Hat flatly states 
that there are issues (snapshots of the operating environment rather that just 
disk images).  While this is true (for example, reverting to a snapshot reverts 
causes the system to have the date/time of the revert as well), we have still 
found value in these kinds of snapshots in a development environment.


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From: CentOS  on behalf of Gregory P. Ennis 

Sent: Sunday, July 1, 2018 9:53 PM
To: CentOS mailing list
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [CentOS] Centos 7.5 on Vmware

On 06/28/2018 02:03 PM, Gregory P. Ennis wrote:
> Everyone,
>
> I am in the initial study phase of putting together a larger virtual
> server while using Centos 7.5 as the operating system of choice for
> the
>  individual virtual machines.
>
> How do you all like VMware for this, or what other software allows
> for
> the development of virtural servers that use Centos 7.5
>
> Thanks ahead of time for giving me a head start with your
> experiences
>

It would be helpful if you gave more details about what you were
looking
for?  Are you planning to run a bare metal hypervisor, or vmware under
Linux or windows?  What are you performance requirements?  IO? CPU?
What
will the VM's be used for?  Do guests requre a graphics console?

Various vmware products ranging from ESXI to vmware workstation are
very
popular. I've run several of them. They work.  I now use the Linux
included, kvm/qemu based Red Hat/CentOS virtualization and it meets my
needs very well for general testing/development, email server, web
server kind of stuff.  I also use this setup along with spice to run
test systems with various graphic GUI's.  I would not say that my virt
servers are very heavily loaded.  I have a Dell R210 running CentOS6
KVM/Qemu and a Dell XPS 9360 running Ubuntu 18.04 with kvm/qemu.

If you prefer fancy mangement GUI's over writing scripts and editing
config files, vmware might be better for you. kvm/qemu does include
virt-manager which is a fairly simply GUI to create and manage VM's,
but
the user interface is not as comprehensive as the interface for
managing
ESXi.

Red Hat does have their high end virtualization products, of which I
believe at least 1 is a bare metal hypervisor.  I have no personal
experience with those products, though if  client came to me with need,
I would examine and seriously consider the Redhat products.

One advantage to the kvm/qemu solution or possibly the redhat
virtualization product is more integrated support.  When I ran vmware,
I
used to run into situations where I wanted to beta test the newest
release of some random linux distribution only to find out that vmware
had not yet implemented support for the graphics driver or some other
new hardware feature being used in the OS that I was trying to test.
In
this way, kvm/qemu feels more integrated.  Like other software,
kvm/qemu
has bugs here and there, but overall, I'm very happy with it and I like
the price of using it under CentOS and Ubuntu.

I see clients all the time, go out and spend a fortune on huge vmware
clusters, that end up very lightly loaded and could easily be run on a
simple kvm/qemu server running under CentOS (or even one of the desktop
virtualization solutions) with a backup server for redundancy, so I
suggest to consider what your requirements really are.  You could
always
go with Redhat if you require support.

Nataraj

-
Nataraj,

Thank you very much for your comments.  I have not put 

Re: [CentOS] Centos 7.5 on Vmware

2018-07-01 Thread Gregory P. Ennis
On 29/06/18 07:03, Gregory P. Ennis wrote:
> Everyone,
> 
> I am in the initial study phase of putting together a larger virtual
> server while using Centos 7.5 as the operating system of choice for
> the
>  individual virtual machines.
> 
> How do you all like VMware for this, or what other software allows
> for
> the development of virtural servers that use Centos 7.5
> 
> Thanks ahead of time for giving me a head start with your
> experiences

We're using KVM/Qemu on CentOS 7.

We changed away from VMware after a lot of trouble with poorly
supported infiniband drivers
(particularly for RDMA and especially SRP with multipathing to
OpenIndiana based ZFS backend
storage). Infiniband support on CentOS is mature and actively supported
upstream. In comparison with
VMware where we were left to manually install drivers available from
OFED (a complete pain to do
with every upgrade and left us with regular 'Purple Screens of Death').

KVM/Qemu + libvirt also gave us the ability to do live migrations
without having to buy into a
higher level of support on VMware.

On the stack we run Windows Servers/Clients, Linux Servers (CentOS
5,6,7; Arch; Ubunutu).
Virt-Manager allows reasonable graphical tools for management but
there's so much you can do with
scripting through virsh and generally with other OS tools (bash,
python, etc.).

I've recently dabbled with an old piece of hardware to implement a ZFS
on Linux CentOS 7 KVM/Qemu
host. This has worked really well but I haven't put any effort in to
expanding the configuration to
share storage via SRPt or iSCSI Targets even though these options are
possible.

Having made the jump from VMware to KVM/Qemu on CentOS 7, I wouldn't
look back.

Tom

-


Tom,

That is very helpful.  Thank you very much for such a full response!!!
I will take a look at KVM/Qem

Greg
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Re: [CentOS] Centos 7.5 on Vmware

2018-07-01 Thread Gregory P. Ennis
On 06/28/2018 02:03 PM, Gregory P. Ennis wrote:
> Everyone,
> 
> I am in the initial study phase of putting together a larger virtual
> server while using Centos 7.5 as the operating system of choice for
> the
>  individual virtual machines.
> 
> How do you all like VMware for this, or what other software allows
> for
> the development of virtural servers that use Centos 7.5
> 
> Thanks ahead of time for giving me a head start with your
> experiences
> 

It would be helpful if you gave more details about what you were
looking
for?  Are you planning to run a bare metal hypervisor, or vmware under
Linux or windows?  What are you performance requirements?  IO? CPU?
What
will the VM's be used for?  Do guests requre a graphics console?

Various vmware products ranging from ESXI to vmware workstation are
very
popular. I've run several of them. They work.  I now use the Linux
included, kvm/qemu based Red Hat/CentOS virtualization and it meets my
needs very well for general testing/development, email server, web
server kind of stuff.  I also use this setup along with spice to run
test systems with various graphic GUI's.  I would not say that my virt
servers are very heavily loaded.  I have a Dell R210 running CentOS6
KVM/Qemu and a Dell XPS 9360 running Ubuntu 18.04 with kvm/qemu.

If you prefer fancy mangement GUI's over writing scripts and editing
config files, vmware might be better for you. kvm/qemu does include
virt-manager which is a fairly simply GUI to create and manage VM's,
but
the user interface is not as comprehensive as the interface for
managing
ESXi.

Red Hat does have their high end virtualization products, of which I
believe at least 1 is a bare metal hypervisor.  I have no personal
experience with those products, though if  client came to me with need,
I would examine and seriously consider the Redhat products.

One advantage to the kvm/qemu solution or possibly the redhat
virtualization product is more integrated support.  When I ran vmware,
I
used to run into situations where I wanted to beta test the newest
release of some random linux distribution only to find out that vmware
had not yet implemented support for the graphics driver or some other
new hardware feature being used in the OS that I was trying to test. 
In
this way, kvm/qemu feels more integrated.  Like other software,
kvm/qemu
has bugs here and there, but overall, I'm very happy with it and I like
the price of using it under CentOS and Ubuntu.

I see clients all the time, go out and spend a fortune on huge vmware
clusters, that end up very lightly loaded and could easily be run on a
simple kvm/qemu server running under CentOS (or even one of the desktop
virtualization solutions) with a backup server for redundancy, so I
suggest to consider what your requirements really are.  You could
always
go with Redhat if you require support.

Nataraj

-
Nataraj,

Thank you very much for your comments.  I have not put together a
virtual machine at this point, so my tree structure of logic is still
very weak.

However, I have three Centos 7.5 machines and one Centos 5.10 that
could reasonably function together.  

Actually the plan has been to upgrade the Centos 5.10 which is a
database server to Centos 7.5.  Currently this is on a SuperMicro SCSI
and we planned to purchase a new machine with SATA drives because 7.5
does not install on SCSI drives.  While planning for this change we
thought of looking a virtual systems on one larger unit.

The other units that are already running 7.5 are a mail/archive server,
a gateway that controls all of the traffic in and out of the network,
and a backup server.  These units service about 30 users, and all
machines have heavy use :) (ok at least by my standards).

Thank you again for your recommendations!

Greg
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Re: [CentOS] Centos 7.5 on Vmware

2018-07-01 Thread Tom Robinson
On 29/06/18 07:03, Gregory P. Ennis wrote:
> Everyone,
> 
> I am in the initial study phase of putting together a larger virtual
> server while using Centos 7.5 as the operating system of choice for the
>  individual virtual machines.
> 
> How do you all like VMware for this, or what other software allows for
> the development of virtural servers that use Centos 7.5
> 
> Thanks ahead of time for giving me a head start with your
> experiences

We're using KVM/Qemu on CentOS 7.

We changed away from VMware after a lot of trouble with poorly supported 
infiniband drivers
(particularly for RDMA and especially SRP with multipathing to OpenIndiana 
based ZFS backend
storage). Infiniband support on CentOS is mature and actively supported 
upstream. In comparison with
VMware where we were left to manually install drivers available from OFED (a 
complete pain to do
with every upgrade and left us with regular 'Purple Screens of Death').

KVM/Qemu + libvirt also gave us the ability to do live migrations without 
having to buy into a
higher level of support on VMware.

On the stack we run Windows Servers/Clients, Linux Servers (CentOS 5,6,7; Arch; 
Ubunutu).
Virt-Manager allows reasonable graphical tools for management but there's so 
much you can do with
scripting through virsh and generally with other OS tools (bash, python, etc.).

I've recently dabbled with an old piece of hardware to implement a ZFS on Linux 
CentOS 7 KVM/Qemu
host. This has worked really well but I haven't put any effort in to expanding 
the configuration to
share storage via SRPt or iSCSI Targets even though these options are possible.

Having made the jump from VMware to KVM/Qemu on CentOS 7, I wouldn't look back.

Tom



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Re: [CentOS] Centos 7.5 on Vmware

2018-06-29 Thread Nataraj
On 06/28/2018 02:03 PM, Gregory P. Ennis wrote:
> Everyone,
>
> I am in the initial study phase of putting together a larger virtual
> server while using Centos 7.5 as the operating system of choice for the
>  individual virtual machines.
>
> How do you all like VMware for this, or what other software allows for
> the development of virtural servers that use Centos 7.5
>
> Thanks ahead of time for giving me a head start with your
> experiences
>

It would be helpful if you gave more details about what you were looking
for?  Are you planning to run a bare metal hypervisor, or vmware under
Linux or windows?  What are you performance requirements?  IO? CPU? What
will the VM's be used for?  Do guests requre a graphics console?

Various vmware products ranging from ESXI to vmware workstation are very
popular. I've run several of them. They work.  I now use the Linux
included, kvm/qemu based Red Hat/CentOS virtualization and it meets my
needs very well for general testing/development, email server, web
server kind of stuff.  I also use this setup along with spice to run
test systems with various graphic GUI's.  I would not say that my virt
servers are very heavily loaded.  I have a Dell R210 running CentOS6
KVM/Qemu and a Dell XPS 9360 running Ubuntu 18.04 with kvm/qemu.

If you prefer fancy mangement GUI's over writing scripts and editing
config files, vmware might be better for you. kvm/qemu does include
virt-manager which is a fairly simply GUI to create and manage VM's, but
the user interface is not as comprehensive as the interface for managing
ESXi.

Red Hat does have their high end virtualization products, of which I
believe at least 1 is a bare metal hypervisor.  I have no personal
experience with those products, though if  client came to me with need,
I would examine and seriously consider the Redhat products.

One advantage to the kvm/qemu solution or possibly the redhat
virtualization product is more integrated support.  When I ran vmware, I
used to run into situations where I wanted to beta test the newest
release of some random linux distribution only to find out that vmware
had not yet implemented support for the graphics driver or some other
new hardware feature being used in the OS that I was trying to test.  In
this way, kvm/qemu feels more integrated.  Like other software, kvm/qemu
has bugs here and there, but overall, I'm very happy with it and I like
the price of using it under CentOS and Ubuntu.

I see clients all the time, go out and spend a fortune on huge vmware
clusters, that end up very lightly loaded and could easily be run on a
simple kvm/qemu server running under CentOS (or even one of the desktop
virtualization solutions) with a backup server for redundancy, so I
suggest to consider what your requirements really are.  You could always
go with Redhat if you require support.

Nataraj


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Re: [CentOS] Centos 7.5 on Vmware

2018-06-28 Thread anax

Hi Greg
here, I use Virtualbox for the following VMs:

- Centos 7.5
- Fedora 28
- Windows 10
- Windows 7
- Windows XP

and no problem sofar (cross fingers).
I download VirtualBox directly from

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/virtualbox/downloads/index.html

That is, I don't use any Virtualbox package offerd by any of the repos.

suomi

On 06/28/2018 11:03 PM, Gregory P. Ennis wrote:

Everyone,

I am in the initial study phase of putting together a larger virtual
server while using Centos 7.5 as the operating system of choice for the
  individual virtual machines.

How do you all like VMware for this, or what other software allows for
the development of virtural servers that use Centos 7.5

Thanks ahead of time for giving me a head start with your
experiences

--
Greg Ennis
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[CentOS] Centos 7.5 on Vmware

2018-06-28 Thread Gregory P. Ennis
Everyone,

I am in the initial study phase of putting together a larger virtual
server while using Centos 7.5 as the operating system of choice for the
 individual virtual machines.

How do you all like VMware for this, or what other software allows for
the development of virtural servers that use Centos 7.5

Thanks ahead of time for giving me a head start with your
experiences

-- 
Greg Ennis
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