Citrix vs. VMware, Users' experience?

[Amos Shapira]

2009/3/5 Ira Abramov <Lists-Linux-IL at ira.abramov.org>:
> I've been waiting for KVM to hit the prime-time for a while, I remember
> Mulix told me a year ago it's "Xen done the right way" and it should be

I'm waiting for it to - but in the meantime I still need to Get Things
Done so I stick to whatever comes pre-packaged and supported with my
SOE distro - namely Xen (3.0) on CentOS 5.

I haven't touched Xen before I started using with it for my current
job and don't remember that it was an issue to get on top of it and
start cranking out platforms for our product.

CentOS 5.4 is scheduled to include KVM so I plan to start playing with
that as soon as it comes out, in parallel to sticking with Xen for
production and generally switch to KVM when I feel comfortable and it
becomes officially supported.

Right now I got my toolset working around Xen 3.0's limitations and am
generally content with the result. We manage to auto-redeploy complete
environments in about an hour of running scripts. One script execution
per virtual host (7 unique hosts for now, total of 14 on two xen hosts
for HA and scalability, more to come soon).

("auto-redeploy" means that we rebuild the image from scratch for
every version upgrade (starting at kickstart with a "%post" script
inside an "xm create" with automatically crafted configuration files),
that way we can be sure that what we have in dev, qa, staging is
exactly the same as what we have in production)

Maybe we should take another look at libvirt if we'll stick to our own
servers instead of moving into the cloud (which we keep looking at).
I'm a Perl guy and get sick from Python's indent-to-enclose but might
have to live with it.

Speaking of cloud platforms - Amazon is not the only game in town,
there are also:
1. Slicehost
2. GoGrid
3. scalr (http://code.google.com/p/scalr/) - an open source interface
to AWS turned into a commercial service too.

These are the ones I can remember off the top of my head right now.

--Amos