Which virtualisation solution to use?

[Cromulent]

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.

 

[Cromulent]

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)

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.

 

[Cromulent]

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.

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.