[AusNOG] Virtualization Technology

[Paul Gear]

On 05/19/2014 12:14 PM, ANSA SERVERS wrote:
>
> I am having a "discussion" with my network engineer and want to know 
> what virtualization platforms people use, has used and like. For 
> example we use OpenVZ / XEN because its stood the test of time and 
> works flawlessly but has used VMWARE and HyperV. My engineer thinks 
> that XEN / OPENVZ is not proper hosting technology
>
> Your *constructive* thoughts / opinions?
>

Hi Matthew,

As usual, the answer is "It depends".  I find that most people 
(including me) typically say "X is not a proper Y" when they are very 
familiar with Z and would rather stick with Z than shift to X.

  * We use a cheap VPS from a hosting service in California to run a
    couple of external monitoring services for our network; it uses
    OpenVZ, and I've been really happy with it because it performs well,
    especially on the I/O side, and is cheap and cheerful.
  * We use VMware for our internal servers because its management tools
    are easy for the PHB to work out.  It probably has the most mature
    suite of virtualisation management tools, but Citrix XenServer and
    Microsoft Hyper-V shouldn't be too far off for 90% of customers.
  * I use the open source version of Xen (with paravirtualisation rather
    than full virtualisation) for my home office server because it's
    available with Debian Linux, there are good command line tools for
    managing it, and it seems to me to have lower overhead than KVM.  I
    support a number of customers who use KVM and VMware.
  * Amazon is built on Xen (as others have pointed out), and Oracle VM
    was originally (and I think still is).
  * Red Hat's solution is based on KVM, and it's the default on OpenStack.
  * Some newer Linux-based cloud management solutions are built on LXC
    (Linux kernel containers - closer to OpenVZ than any of the other
    mentioned solutions), for example Docker.
  * I would assume that VMware's and Microsoft's public clouds are based
    on their respective hypervisors.

If I were building a new Netflix on a public cloud today, I'd check out 
Docker.  If I were building an enterprise virtualisation farm, I'd 
probably go with VMware.  If I were building a hosting service that's 
not quite cloud, I'd probably give Xen, OpenVZ, and Hyper-V a run 
through their paces and see which one worked best. If I were buying it 
all from someone else, I wouldn't care and would go for the one that 
best suited my functionality and availability requirements.

In short, all of them are solid; use what works for you.

Regards,
Paul

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