Proxmox, Mirantis Openstack, KVM, oh my
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@Kelly said:
My budget is "as little as possible", which puts all but the community version of XenServer or Xen out of my reach.
Are there other version? The only thing you would be looking at cost wise would be the cost of support which you may or may not need.
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If you are going to go cloud, of course OpenStack is where to start. Once you go there, you have to choose your hypervisor. Xen and KVM are the choices there. Both work fine.
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If you have a Windows heavy workload, KVM rules. If you have a Linux heavy workload, Xen rules.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I was going to say XenServer as well. ProxMox to me, other than the nice web interface, is an odd duck from a company I don't trust. XenServer is very enterprise, under heavy development, delivered directly from the Linux Foundation and extremely mature. It is feature rich and should provide you anything that you need.
This. The maturity level of XenServer and the amount of ongoing development is amazing.
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Hmm, I had read some things that were very critical of Xen in general because of the way it has been controlled by the larger players and made mostly to suit their needs. Perhaps I need to add it back in to my list of options.
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@coliver said:
@Kelly said:
My budget is "as little as possible", which puts all but the community version of XenServer or Xen out of my reach.
Are there other version? The only thing you would be looking at cost wise would be the cost of support which you may or may not need.
There is, Citrix provides an Enterprise version with Citrix specific extra stuff.
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@scottalanmiller 98% Linux.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
@Kelly said:
My budget is "as little as possible", which puts all but the community version of XenServer or Xen out of my reach.
Are there other version? The only thing you would be looking at cost wise would be the cost of support which you may or may not need.
There is, Citrix provides an Enterprise version with Citrix specific extra stuff.
I was not aware, I thought they were doing something like Redhat was doing with RHEL and CentOS.
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@scottalanmiller said:
If you are going to go cloud, of course OpenStack is where to start. Once you go there, you have to choose your hypervisor. Xen and KVM are the choices there. Both work fine.
Any thoughts on Mirantis vs other packages vs vanilla OpenStack?
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@Kelly said:
Hmm, I had read some things that were very critical of Xen in general because of the way it has been controlled by the larger players and made mostly to suit their needs. Perhaps I need to add it back in to my list of options.
FUD. The KVM crowd (IBM and RH specifically) have worked like crazy to discredit Xen because KVM doesn't make much sense with Xen doing so well. Both Xen and KVM are owned by the Linux Foundation. But IBM and RH have their money bet on KVM, so they work hard to promote it.
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@Kelly said:
Hmm, I had read some things that were very critical of Xen in general because of the way it has been controlled by the larger players and made mostly to suit their needs. Perhaps I need to add it back in to my list of options.
Funny, that's actually a concern with KVM, rather than Xen. Xen was academic and purely open source. KVM was built to support the big corporate players. KVM is guided by enormous companies, Xen mostly by the cloud players.
Xen is what powers Amazon, Rackspace and IBM clouds. KVM powers Digital Ocean and Vultr.
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So Xen or community XenServer? Is there a difference?
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@Kelly said:
@scottalanmiller said:
If you are going to go cloud, of course OpenStack is where to start. Once you go there, you have to choose your hypervisor. Xen and KVM are the choices there. Both work fine.
Any thoughts on Mirantis vs other packages vs vanilla OpenStack?
Have not played enough to say. I'd be likely to look at Ubuntu and Suse packages.
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@Kelly said:
So Xen or community XenServer? Is there a difference?
Community XenServer has a fantastic management console as well as a ton of CLI commands to make management easier. I'm still not sure I understand the difference completely no matter how many times @scottalanmiller explains it.
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@Kelly said:
So Xen or community XenServer? Is there a difference?
Yes. One is a kernel, one is a distro.
Xen is just the hypervisor a la Linux. XenServer is the official distro made by Citrix and Xen themselves that has everything that you need to actually use Xen a la CentOS.
So Xen is to Linux as XenServer is to CentOS.
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XenServer is Xen + CentOS Dom0 + XAPI + installer + some extra tools.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Kelly said:
So Xen or community XenServer? Is there a difference?
Yes. One is a kernel, one is a distro.
Xen is just the hypervisor a la Linux. XenServer is the official distro made by Citrix and Xen themselves that has everything that you need to actually use Xen a la CentOS.
So Xen is to Linux as XenServer is to CentOS.
Ah, this makes sense I was trying to articulate this in my head and couldn't. Thanks for the clarification.
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So what is it about XenServer that makes it preferred over KVM particularly for Linux workloads?
