[geeks] Virtualization Smackdown

[Jonathan Groll]

On Wed, 15 Oct 2014 14:14:13 +0100, Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com> wrote:

> > 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.

xen-tools is a near magical method for creating Debian instances -
debootstrap does the heavy lifting and you get a new domU instance
super easily. What distro do you use - RHEL?

Also, what did you mean by patching Xen?

Cheers, 
Jonathan