oVirt vs Xenserver vs vSphere ESXi

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I'm currently playing with vSphere ESXi & vSAN in my home lab which is pretty awesome especially with DRS/HA & replicated storage across the 3 hosts. Obviously this isn't a long term solution for my home lab as VMWare is not cheap (as in free or close to) so I'm looking longer term at other solutions and I'd also like to drop to 2 nodes instead of 3.

I've used Xenserver extensively but with the release of 7.3, its now put some of the features behind a paywall; most notably rolling pool patches and HA. I'm looking at HA-Lizard as a way to provide a 2 node HA as I don't really need 3 nodes and then I can consolidate my RDimms in to two machines and then using Starwind vSAN free via command line for replicated storage across the hosts.

However I came across oVirt 4.2 today and with the new GUI it looks pretty cool but I've never used it and I don't know how it compares to the other two? Does it do HA & pooling out of the box? What about shared / replicated storage using local drives? Can it do a 2 node pool without split brain like HAlizard can do for Xenserver? Whats the performance like?

Appreciate that there are a lot of questions re: oVirt but I'm looking for something with HA and replicated storage for various personal reasons and not sure if oVirt is useful?

Thanks in advance!

Chris
 
Have you looked at Proxmox? I'm pretty sure it can provide HA and replicated storage, although the HA is maybe not as advanced as ESXi or VMWare.

Can't say that I've used oVirt but I will definitely take a look at it now.
 
I tested oVirt quite extensively a few months back assessing it for a project at work and it can do all the things you mention. It did replicated storage using GlusterFS which you might already be familiar with?

I think it needs 3 hosts to avoid split brain but I could be wrong.

Something else to look at is Ganeti, I’ve not had a play with it yet but from what I’ve been told and read it seems to have potential.
 
Hi Caged, lab is not for any form of training... I'm a Civil Engineer, so not in IT in any sense... I just enjoy tech and wanted to have my own email, essentials server for general AD stuff, unifi controller etc. for the family. HA is important so that I don't have to worry about the email VM failing in the advent of host failure and getting random calls from the family as to why the email has failed.

With VMUG, clearly this is quite good as I'm not opposed to paying for technology if its within my grasp, can anyone sign up and use it even if they're not in education or training or does that not really matter as long as its not used in production?

With VMWare, ignoring vSAN as that requires a witness server for a 2 node roll out, with some form of shared storage does it suffer from split-brain in a 2 node setup? I've got it in a 3 node right now while playing with vSAN but with vSAN a 2 node failure of the 3 means complete failure of the cluster but I'm not sure if ESXi can deal with that if vSAN wasn't there? From what I've read it might not suffer from splitbrain on a 2 node setup but I'm not sure.
 
Anybody can join VMUG Advantage and use the evaluation licenses. You just can’t use them in production, there’s no requirement to be a student or anything like that.
 
Cool thanks caged

How does ESXi deal with a node down in a 2 node HA config, assuming shared storage via NAS or similar? Does it get a split brain or does it know through heartbeating a file locks who is master/slave and what should happen?
 
I am using free starwinds VSAN https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free in my home lab (two small supermicro servers). I have tested it with Hyper-V and VMware (works pretty well on both). There is no GUI for free version unfortunately but PowerShell API does the job. On my way to try it with XenServer. Most probably will end up with Free Hyper-V 2016 + Free starwind VSAN. Since most of VMs I am running are Linux (media center, PBX, etc.) this scenario fits and does not require any additional licensing.
 
Yeah I've been testing vSAN from starwind as a few test VMs. Performance sucks but only due to the fact that I'm running starwind from my vmware vsan! I've got a 'new' Dell R710 waiting for some rails and a new HBA to arrive and then I'll make the shift; move all to my xpenology array and then rebuild the vsan on the two R710s and then I'll figure out what I'll do with the xpenology; baremetal or virtualised on esxi.

How have you been finding the performance of starwind?
 
@Net Runner Are you running 10gbe or 1gbe networks for the iscsi? I've been looking at Mellanox ConnectX-2 cards with SFP+ DAC cables for 10GB connection between the nodes. While I'm currently using spinning drives, the move to flash storage for these would benefit from the higher speed for replication as well as iSCSI connections.
 
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