On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 6:20 AM, Yoann Dandine <yoann.dandine@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> My name is Yoann Dandine, I'm in placement for my studies. I'm french, then
> my english is not really good but I hope you'll understand.
>
> I have to provide virtual machines for testing the application my company
> is working on. I've to test the installation and how it runs on some linux
> distributions and windows versions. I find a lot of solutions but
> paravirtualization don't seem to work with Windows and full virtualization
> seems to be better for my case. Do you agree with this ?
>
I really cannot answer that one, but what I can say is that when
you run it in Linux, you can make this linux install very
minimal/small -- no gui, as few packages as possible -- so most of
your resources are used by the virtual machines themselves (the vm
guests or clients). In fact, that is the VMWare ESXi approach.
Not having a gui in the machine you are running KVM -- the vm host --
is not that bad; you can connect to it remotely.
> Then KVM seems to be the best solution for my needs, being free, deployed
> on all linux distributions, supporting HVM, with a nice future in sight. I
> think KVM could be a better choice than Xen because I read that it has
> better performances, simpler to use (that's quite important because I'm not
> experimented in virtualization) but maybe not even advanced as Xen at the
> moment.
>
I have not used Xen in a while, but I can say KVM/QEMU is being
actively/aggressively developed.
> I would really like some opinions on this, I've to provide solutions with
> their pros and cons soon and I want to provide THE good solution for the
> company. About it, the company is small/medium, looking for this solution
> and maybe extending then to a cloud platform (but it is not really
> important at the moment, the possibility of extension would be
> interesting). I've read that KVM is used and some companies are leaving Xen
> for it at the moment or would like to. Then the Red Hat choice to turn RHEV
> based on KVM confirms that.
>
There is really no The Good Solution, only the best solution (or
the least worse ;) ) for your needs. For instance, as soon as I can
get SCO Unix (we have to support it unfortunately) on KVM/QEMU, I
would be retiring VirtualBox for consistency's sake (We have 4 KVM
hosts right now at work). I have never used the KVM gui, but am quite
familiar with the ESXi and the VirtualBox ones; I do prefer to do
stuff in KVM (and VirtualBox for that matter in the command line;
easier to script stuff).
> I've also read a lot about VMware solutions, Hyper-V server, Parallels,
> VirtualBox, Proxmox VE, oVirt but it doesn't seems to be really great for
> my company's needs.
> I may miss a lot of things then, I would like to know it and if there is
> important things I don't know yet. And what you or some experimented people
> could recommend for this company.
>
I know nothing about your company or its needs. Some people are
very productive with lightweight vms or even chroot jails, and others
need something more full blown. You owe to yourself to select at the
very least two candidates, if not three, and try them out. You need to
define what is the criteria you want to compare those solutions
against; here are some I pulled off my ass as starting points:
o Easy to use? (a bit subjective)
o Hardware and software requirements?
o PCI passthrough?
o Speed?
o Support?
o Live migration?
o Snapshots?
o CPU (emulation) support?
o Emulated hardware?
o Which OS can the guest run?
o Export/import capabilities?
o Network storage (iscsi, etc) support?
o Logging and monitoring?
o Security?
As you see, now we have more objective criteria to compare the
different solutions. I bet some of these are not important to you, so
you need to make your own list.
> Thanks,
>
> Yoann Dandine.
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