Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
We're getting a new box at work to host virtual machines, and I'm
trying to figure out what the best virtualisation solution might be.
The specs will very likely be a dual quad-core CPU with 32GB RAM,
running CentOS.
I'd like to have something that:
* is FOSS
* is easy to manage (I've got other responsibilities and don't want to
be bogged down with sysadmin work)
* can preferably also run on our Fedora 8 desktops, so we can share VM images
* can support a wide variety of guest OSs (especially Linux, Windows
and Solaris)
Most of my experience is with VMware, but that's proprietary. We've
got some Xen experience in the office, but this server will be managed
by me and quite frankly I find Xen to be overly complicated. KVM looks
very neat, in that it uses Linux as the hypervisor and so doesn't try
to be an OS unto itself. It's also Red Hat's preferred virtualisation
platform nowadays, which is great since we use a lot of Red Hat and
CentOS.
Cheers,
Sridhar
I've used KVM for a few places quite successfully,
Setup out of the box is nice and easy, you can use virt-manager to get a
nice pointy-clicky interface to it (at the expense of some of the nifty
features like live migration etc)
performance seems acceptable, there are paravirtualised drivers for
windows out now for both network and disk (as I recall).
The latest debian ships with paravirtualised disk and network in the
kernel so performance is quite good there, (some fiddling to get it to
use it but nothing too drastic).
At home I use it on an ubuntu 8.10 server that is also my TV in 6Gb ram
quad core machine, It happily handles a 3 core virtual machine with
3.5Gb of ram running a mail server, another one with 350mb of ram as the
backup server, a web server and the web server for the accounts machine,
both of which use 128mb of ram. All of the small machines are given 2
CPU's, as the work load is fairly bursty.
I also tried Xen but gave up because it was just too hard to work with,
and its headed closed source these days anyway, well at least the "big
boys toys" are anyway.
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