[geeks] Virtualization Smackdown

[JP Hindin]

On Wed, 15 Oct 2014, Mark Benson wrote:
> Xen
> Kvm
> VMWare vSphere Essentials
>
> I have very little VM experience aside from Virtualbox and some tinkering
> with Xen.

We run around 900 Xen VMs at work and we're pretty happy with them. We are
also currently completing migration of some reasonably heavy VoIP software
onto them. We used to run the VoIP dialers (combination of Java and
libPJSIP stack running about a thousand channels per instance) on OpenVZ
(something our head of IT picked out of his ear) and discovered earlier
this year that the Xen networking stack beat OpenVZ's hands down and
blindfolded. We've since moved them to Xen with SR-IOV handling the
network and we're bombing 10,000 VoIP channels per Dell M620 blade (dual
ten-core Xeons) with all the bells and whistles turned up (DSPs, et al).

/etc/redhat-release says:
XenServer release 5.6.100-39215p (xenenterprise)

We use a combination of CLI management (mostly for exporting/importing)
and XenCenter which you apparently can get free licencing for. XC has its
quirks, and we're running it primarily on Windows RDP servers (running on
the Xen hosts, no less) for getting console and the VM creation which we
then netboot/puppet to complete the software package installations.

For what it's worth, between the CLI and XC I've had no feeling that I was
missing any tools, and Xen seems to take anything we throw at it (assuming
you get away from the vswitch network software, which kind of stinks under
high packet-per-second loading)... and we tend to really pummel equipment.

Good luck in your decision;

 - JP