Are you using non-VMWare Virtualization in prod/serious testing?

riddlermarc · 24 Aug 2008 at 15:48

There are loads of threads of people using ESX (now ESXi too) but I'm just wondering if anyone has been brave enough to standardise on Xen, Hyper-V etc?
We use ESX at work (it just works, doesn't it) but I'm an OSS man and would love to hear any stories of people using Xen (not necessarily Xensource) and how they managed to get it into either production or a decent testing environment?

I know the bosses are wary of anything that isn't covered to the nth degree by a support contract and tend to play it "safe"..

dave-lew99 · 24 Aug 2008 at 19:23

We use Xen running on NetBSD (with two NetBSD guests/DomU's) and the box has been up since i installed it, about a year ago without any problems (a couple of specific BSD related things like max number of file descriptors, but nothing Xen related)

Oddly enough, it was my boss who insisted on using Xen and NetBSD...not my choice but then again, i can't really fault a faultless system (although it can be a bit of a pain to administer at times!)

m4cc45 · 24 Aug 2008 at 19:39

Well we are going to be using a lot more of VM but also looking at using Microsoft Server 2008 Hyper V (the light version which is similar to VM).

I'll report back here my findings. Should have some decent results in a few weeks.

M.

Basher · 26 Aug 2008 at 18:53

m4cc45 said:
... looking at using Microsoft Server 2008 Hyper V (the light version which is similar to VM).

I'll report back here my findings. Should have some decent results in a few weeks.

M.

Does having all I/O running through a single parent (or 'root') partition not worry you?

Stolly · 26 Aug 2008 at 23:00

Basher said:
Does having all I/O running through a single parent (or 'root') partition not worry you?

Not being able to live migrate workloads would worry me more.

I support a large VMware environment and we have dozens of DRS migrations a day as the clusters constantly juggle workloads to keep the hosts at ~50% CPU.

How on earth would you manage that manually ?

Curiosityx · 27 Aug 2008 at 15:44

Personally i wouldn't consider such an alternative, VmWare has a proven track record and a great amount of third party support for all of it's products. Ill admit i haven't tested similar competing offerings but as yet i haven't run into a situation that Vmware doesn't have a solution for.

Im sure that such technologies as Virtual Server 2005 and HyperV have a role to play as they tend to come integrated into the product unfortunately for Microsoft, ESX was then released freely which i imagine put a spanner in the works, before said move the only factor when considering virtualisation was cost.

madman045 · 27 Aug 2008 at 16:41

Tried Hyper-V, but found the performance to be sluggish and kept having network issues with the guests, now installed ESXi and reinstalling the VMs and everythings running fine

CraigN · 27 Aug 2008 at 17:12

Microsoft will get there they were jsut a bit slow on the take up for some reason.

In a few years VMWare/EMC will be a small fry and MS will have poached all of VMwares stadf and have a better product.

Isnt that what allways happens ?

Curiosityx · 27 Aug 2008 at 17:31

CraigN said:
Isnt that what allways happens ?

Yes i imagine they will gain some of the market share but i don't see them being able to make a significant stand against the likes of the companies above, there product is already in a large percentage of businesses and more importantly data centres.

The hardware support is already in place and the likes of HP are even integrating it directly onto the motherboards across some of the DL and Blade servers lines.

drak3 · 27 Aug 2008 at 17:39

CraigN said:
Microsoft will get there they were jsut a bit slow on the take up for some reason.

In a few years VMWare/EMC will be a small fry and MS will have poached all of VMwares stadf and have a better product.

Isnt that what allways happens ?

They will try hard thats for sure, but a well established, supported, and now free product will not lose market share easy. M$ need to "force" people into hyper-v if they want quick results IMO.

oddjob62 · 27 Aug 2008 at 18:18

CraigN said:
Microsoft will get there they were jsut a bit slow on the take up for some reason.

In a few years VMWare/EMC will be a small fry and MS will have poached all of VMwares stadf and have a better product.

Isnt that what allways happens ?

Well RIM still have a huge share of the mobile email market, even though MS brought out their push email several years ago now.

Citrix still do pretty well in their field as well (how long has MS had Terminal Services?)

Stolly · 27 Aug 2008 at 19:14

All that being said, Novell were pretty happy with their position 12 years or so ago and how many people run Netware these days ?

J1nxy · 27 Aug 2008 at 21:01

oddjob62 said:
Citrix still do pretty well in their field as well (how long has MS had Terminal Services?)

Citrix sold Microsoft Terminal Services. They are one of the top partners for MS and input into the code base.

The agreement between them is that MS put out the basic functionality and then Citrix add all the fun stuff that goes round it. This has been the case with Terminal Services and Metaframe/Presentation Server/XenApp and is also how they are approaching Hyper-V. Citrix are building the management set which supports Xen to also plug into Hyper-V

Witor · 29 Aug 2008 at 08:26

Have 2 Hyper-V servers running, one live, one test. Quietly impressed.

One has been running Sophos Enterprise Console for about a month now (as Primary updating site). No major worries network/speed wise.

The other is more of a feckabout server, running spiceworks on it at the moment...

a1ex2001 · 29 Aug 2008 at 13:42

Nodirection said:
One has been running Sophos Enterprise Console for about a month now (as Primary updating site). No major worries network/speed wise.

Sophos is hardly a stenuous test given you could probably run it without any problems on PDA! It is however a prime candidate for VM given it's low power requirments so I supose it makes sense.

Witor · 30 Aug 2008 at 10:51

Indeed.

It was also an opportunity to sort out our sophos installation as many clients (850 in total) could not contact the old server for some reason, sophos' technical team weren't too sure why it was happening either.

Either way, pleased with reliability and performance so far...

m4cc45 · 30 Aug 2008 at 22:30

Sophos team are never sure. It's the only antivirus I know that doesn't, by default, enable the Antivirus Real Time Scanning on Servers?

Back on topic we will only be using it to run minor stuff as a test. AV / IIS boxes / basically anything with low I/O.

M.

bigredshark · 30 Aug 2008 at 23:06

We were testing Xen quite seriously for production until our testing revealed it to be nothing like as good as VMware. Looked at HyperV briefly, but it's hardly ESX (or even ESXi)

J1nxy · 30 Aug 2008 at 23:19

What were you testing and what version Xen?

celliott · 30 Aug 2008 at 23:25

We use Xen (3.1) in production to provide basic Linux VMs. It offers great performance + isolation. Having said that, KVM will take it's place soon with a major benefit being that it's part of the mainline Linux Kernel.