[geeks] Virtualization Smackdown

[Mark Benson]

> 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 :)

Thanks. Were/are your. Xen VMs linux paravirtualised instances or full VMs?
I've played a bit with debian PVMs on Xen but not anything further. My big
stumbling block with Xen is management. CLI is fine while I can remember
what I'm doing, but it'd be more handy to visualise with a web or desktop
GUI.

-- 
Mark Benson

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