[geeks] Virtualization Smackdown

[Jonathan Katz]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 8:36 AM, Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Xen
> Kvm
> VMWare vSphere Essentials

At my last job our "lab" systems (we had things like ArcSight, Splunk,
and other products running in tandem) we did on Xen on CentOS 6.3
(which we eventually took to 6.4.) It wasn't officially "supported" by
anyone, but was easy enough to do with a cookbook we found on-line. It
worked. yum update worked, too, we just had to be sure to manually
edit the grub menu so the Xen kernel booted. With lib-virt there is a
decent CLI and GUI to hack around with. Worst case you export your
config in XML, hack on it, then "rebuild." Since you're building a
production system with two VMs (legacy and new world, essentially) the
system is fairly static. You're not going to configure 10 different
VMs all the time and spin stuff up and down 10x/day. So you can "get
away" with Xen.

If you want something free and easy enough for the masses then look at
VirtualBox on top of something like Ubuntu. You get the GUI tools
anyone can understand and 0 cost.