[geeks] Virtualization Smackdown

[David Brownlee]

On 15 October 2014 07:36, Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> We're planning a large systems move at work to something running on
> Python/Postgres and it means our new production server (8-core Xeon Dell
> Poweredge T610) is going to have to support 2 environments, the new one and
> a LAMP environment.
>
> While we have as second server (HP ProLiant ML310e v2 Gen8) I'd like to use
> that as some form of redundant fallback to add failover capacity.
>
> I also have a HP Microserver that I use for Dev that would ideally need to
> support both so I can putz about with them in isolation.
>
> Somewhere in the production environment I'd like also like an isolated LAMP
> server to host an internal version of our website so we have a reference
> version, and also a Samba server for sharing files between desks.
>
> We don't plan on using Windows on the server side at all.
>
> I'd like to virtualise them to keep instances of MySQL and Postgres from
> fighting each other for resources. I've looked into the whole thing and
> narrowed it down to using:
>
> Xen
> Kvm
> VMWare vSphere Essentials
>
> I have very little VM experience aside from Virtualbox and some tinkering
> with Xen.
>
> Xen's great if you use XenServer but it's a bitch to patch unless you buy
> support (too expensive), or it's easy to patch but a cow to manage if you
> use CLI tools.
>
> Never used KVM.
>
> VMware has a solid reputation, isn't that expensive and Essentials covers 3
> machines and 6 sockets, which is a perfect fit. I've never used it either.
> The only downer is it's on a rolling support contract
>
> I'd appreciate advice from anyone who's used any or all those environments
> as to relative advantages and drawbacks. We're a small company and don't
> have pots of money.
>

We had an i7 vSphere setup for our text boxes - about 4VMs with 2-3GB each,
mainly RedHat with a mix of java, MySQL & PostgreSQL. It was "fine", but IO
was quite poor - running a 'yum update' on two boxes at the same time would
grind everything to a halt. Also trying to clone VMs using the management
interface was... painful at best. Stupid issues like you could copy an
installed image into a new VM's directory, but then it would still be named
after the first VM and the interface would not let you rename. But it was
the IO performance that killed it for us in the end

We had planned to put more onto it but we tried xen on an old i5 box to
play with (with a couple of crappy 80GB disks in software RAID1), and with
6 VMs it felt like twice the i7 box... So the following day vSphere went
away and we've been very happy with Xen on the i7 hardware ever since
(currently running 9 VMs)

That was all with the xen CLI tools, which turned out to be much less
painful than expected.

This is about 2 years ago, so vSphere has undoubtedly been improved since
then and I'm sure (hope?) the higher cost enterprise VMware products would
have a less crappy interface and better performance, but just my penneth's
worth :)