Which virtualisation solution to use?

Cromulent

Cromulent

Cromulent

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I'm currently investigating my virtualisation options. At the moment the leading candidate by far is KVM running on Debian. Next up would probably be VMWare ESXi.

The options that I have looked at are as follows:

KVM (leading candidate)
Xen HVM
VMWare ESXi 5.5 (free version)
Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 (free version)

I was wondering if people had any experience using these virtualisation options to run predominately Linux / FreeBSD / OpenBSD guests with the slim possibility of running Windows Server 2012 R2 guests in the future?

I've had experience with KVM and ESXi for these types of guests and have had good results from both. Xen HVM is meant to have some issues with *BSD guests but haven't had the chance to explore in-depth and obviously Hyper-V comes last due to it being primarily aimed at Windows guests.

Any thoughts or suggestions with deploying any of these to production? There is only so much testing you can do on test servers before you have to hit it with a production work load.
 
Of the options listed we use ESX for 99% of our virtualised estate of Linux boxes both production and non-production. The only Linux that doesn't tend to get virtualised are large Oracle database servers in production (and you have to be careful to understand the licensing and support implications of any virtualised Oracle anyway). We're not using ESX 5.5 yet though as it's still going through our service acceptance processes.

We do have some virtualised Linux on Oracle VM (x86), which I believe is XEN under the hood, but that is a god-awful product which has given us nothing but issues (both technical and with the quality of Oracle's support)
 
memyselfandi said:
Of the options listed we use ESX for 99% of our virtualised estate of Linux boxes both production and non-production. The only Linux that doesn't tend to get virtualised are large Oracle database servers in production (and you have to be careful to understand the licensing and support implications of any virtualised Oracle anyway). We're not using ESX 5.5 yet though as it's still going through our service acceptance processes.

We do have some virtualised Linux on Oracle VM (x86), which I believe is XEN under the hood, but that is a god-awful product which has given us nothing but issues (both technical and with the quality of Oracle's support)
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Thanks for the response. I'm thinking of heading down the ESXi route but I'm concerned about the expenses when we reach a certain size. Virtualisation is absolutely essential in my line of work. I can't really afford to get this wrong as it would be pretty tough to change once up and running.
 
If it's mission critical then surely the costs between all the options is pretty similar once you've either paid for support for them all or employed someone who knows how to look after them? VMware isn't cheap, but it does tend to work quite well.
 
memyselfandi said:
you have to be careful to understand the licensing and support implications of any virtualised Oracle anyway
Click to expand...

haha so true, they landed a bill of £5.8 million on my desk last week, with a 76% discount before end of April bringing it down to something like £1.4 million with a yearly support cost of £210k because we have an Enterprise instance and all the gubbins on a single Windows server, but its VM so sits across 9 ESX hosts ... Oracle do not recognise virtualisation in any way shape or form

Needless to say we're not paying for it, used Oracle GoldenGate to replicate the DB to an SQL box, and made sure the dev team were happy with the data, then Oracle got uninstalled and that VM switched off.
 
Caged said:
If it's mission critical then surely the costs between all the options is pretty similar once you've either paid for support for them all or employed someone who knows how to look after them? VMware isn't cheap, but it does tend to work quite well.
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I'm a start-up. Yes it would be nice to be able to afford the best support for mission critical stuff but at some point you have to say I only have £x. What are the most important things I need to spend that money on?

I really have to keep a close watch on the purse strings especially when the licensing costs for VMWare / Microsoft / whatever could easily pay for more servers which would increase redundancy and high availability.

Building out a system as a small company with servers in many data centres and in many countries is not cheap.
 
We're totally VMware but I can't see it lasting for the simple reason that Microsoft licensing changes make it ridiculously cheap to go for Hyper-V instead if you have a lot of servers running Windows.

Our IT director is very anti-MS but even he can't ignore the cost benefits much longer
 
That doesn't tell the whole picture though - the cost differences are minimal because you can run Server 2012 Datacenter on top of ESXi / any other virtualisation platform, the only difference being that you don't need to license the hypervisor.

Except ESXi and Hyper-V are both free anyway, where the cost comes in is with management, and by the time you've paid for the full System Center suite you're spending similar to what vCenter costs but now have a much bigger beast to manage and a lot more server instances required to keep your virtual environment running. If you're already a System Center shop then this transition isn't going to be nearly as painful, but especially since vCenter started shipping as a usable appliance the amount of work required to get a fully DRS/DPM/HA etc environment up using VMware is a lot easier/quicker/has less dependencies than doing the same thing with Hyper-V.

Added to that the storage of choice being a Server 2012 File Server or an appliance based on Storage Server, of which they are few and far between (yes eventually NetApp, IBM, EqualLogic etc will start making unified boxes that do this, but it's not happened yet) and Microsoft's pretty bone-headed decision to only allow Windows 8 to manage Server 2012 through the management tools and I just don't think the platform is quite there yet. They only just moved to a VM format that used SCSI rather than IDE for the virtual disks, and unlike VMware you can't migrate the VM hardware, you have to rebuild the virtual server. The whole experience just seems a lot 'messier' than performing the same tasks in VMware.

I can see that they are trying to become relevant, and more competition is encouraged, but they got part way there and then did a typical Microsoft thing of completely over-complicating the management back-end.
 
Terrier_Jimlad said:
haha so true, they landed a bill of £5.8 million on my desk last week, with a 76% discount before end of April bringing it down to something like £1.4 million with a yearly support cost of £210k because we have an Enterprise instance and all the gubbins on a single Windows server, but its VM so sits across 9 ESX hosts ... Oracle do not recognise virtualisation in any way shape or form

Needless to say we're not paying for it, used Oracle GoldenGate to replicate the DB to an SQL box, and made sure the dev team were happy with the data, then Oracle got uninstalled and that VM switched off.
Click to expand...

Isn't Oracle well known for their sky high pricing anyway?
 
Terrier_Jimlad said:
haha so true, they landed a bill of £5.8 million on my desk last week, with a 76% discount before end of April bringing it down to something like £1.4 million with a yearly support cost of £210k because we have an Enterprise instance and all the gubbins on a single Windows server, but its VM so sits across 9 ESX hosts ... Oracle do not recognise virtualisation in any way shape or form

Needless to say we're not paying for it, used Oracle GoldenGate to replicate the DB to an SQL box, and made sure the dev team were happy with the data, then Oracle got uninstalled and that VM switched off.
Click to expand...

I hope you've licenced all the VM hosts for SQL Server, because Microsoft are no better than Oracle when it comes to licensing on VMWare virtual hardware. At least Oracle make their position very clear from the outset. If you're using VMotion across the whole estate, they require you to licence all the CPU's/cores. If you limit VMotion to specific hosts, then it is acceptable to licence just those hosts, but you must licence all the hardware in them.

If you've managed to migrate your database to SQL so easily then you're probably not getting much benefit from Oracle anyway.

scrlk said:
Isn't Oracle well known for their sky high pricing anyway?
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Oracle Database Enterprise Edition is very expensive, but it's (arguably) the most powerful database management system available. Standard Edition is very powerful and can be licenced relatively inexpensively because they don't count cores, only processor sockets.

I run systems using both Oracle and SQL Server and I would say Oracle is the better product. SQL Server is easier to manage - if I said to a someone with reasonable Windows admin skills get me a backup of database of X they'd figure it out in SQL Server, in Oracle they'd probably struggle.
 
Cromulent said:
I'm a start-up. Yes it would be nice to be able to afford the best support for mission critical stuff but at some point you have to say I only have £x. What are the most important things I need to spend that money on?

I really have to keep a close watch on the purse strings especially when the licensing costs for VMWare / Microsoft / whatever could easily pay for more servers which would increase redundancy and high availability.

Building out a system as a small company with servers in many data centres and in many countries is not cheap.
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Perhaps, but trying to do too much with too little is one of the most common mistakes startups like to make...

The end game when you take that approach is a product which is lacking in performance, reliability or features. The usual answer is to do less but do it better. Raising greater capital is nice but generally if you've got to this point then it's too late.

Building out servers in many datacenters in many countries is not cheap at all, most people underestimate the costs quite significantly (hardware will fail in the most inconvenient location at the worst time, and that's for a company with hundreds of staff around the world, if you have 25 staff in the UK god help you).

As a small company *don't do it* because it's extremely unlikely you need to. Part of my job these days is working out how much global reach you really need to operate a CDN / Anycast network and the answer is much less than you think even if you want to play at being cloudflare etc

I can think of a half dozen examples of global companies who you'd expect to have presence *everywhere* who serve the entire use base using 3 or 4 datacenters at most (and those ones I know because they're either companies who've asked me for network consultancy or clients of my current employer).

*disclaimer: There are niche applications where latency *really* matters (and I mean actually really matters, when you can calculate the cost to the business per 1ms of latency then you might have a case) which demand these kind of global presence. Fortunately most of these applications are around finance, where money is plentiful. In this case, go capitalise the business properly rather than doing it on the cheap because these applications and their customers will not tolerate unreliable service.
 
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At my current job we use Hyper-V on 2008 R2 - and while it has its place, I still much prefer vmware.

ESX is a great product and used it before at previous job - so many features and compatible with almost any OS. Additional benefit of VMWare is the Virtual Appliance marketplace - so many prebuilt appliances out there that just work.

Nothing like that for Hyper-V

Just my 2 cents
 
Having read your posts again it seems like what you're actually trying to do is build your own cloud as opposed to the more traditional use of VMware / Hyper-V. In which case if you're asking for help here you really need to either do as bigredshark suggested and don't bother and instead learn how to master Amazon or Azure's APIs to handle managing and growing your application running on top of it, or get hold of some people who know what they are doing who are happy to wrestle something like OpenStack into doing what you want.
 
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soisix said:
At my current job we use Hyper-V on 2008 R2 - and while it has its place, I still much prefer vmware.

ESX is a great product and used it before at previous job - so many features and compatible with almost any OS. Additional benefit of VMWare is the Virtual Appliance marketplace - so many prebuilt appliances out there that just work.

Nothing like that for Hyper-V

Just my 2 cents
Click to expand...

If you're going to compare Hyper-V 2 to VMWare, then VMWare will waltz it every time. It's only in the 2012/R2 iterations that the gap has really started to close.
 
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