better platform for virtualization

[Jonathan Ben Avraham]

Hi Gilad,
Why do you recommend KVM over XEN? Have you fiddled with both? Are there 
particular problems with XEN?
Thanks,

  - yba


On Mon, 18 Jan 2010, Gilad Ben-Yossef wrote:

> Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:33:26 +0200
> From: Gilad Ben-Yossef <gilad at codefidence.com>
> To: Michael Lewinger <mikilewinger at gmail.com>
> Cc: Arie Blum <arikbbb at googlemail.com>,
>     Israeli Linux mailing list <linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il>,
>     Oleg Kovalev <oleg at elk-group.com>
> Subject: Re: better platform for virtualization
> 
> Hi,
>
>
> Michael Lewinger wrote:
>
>> 
>> 
>> I'd like to ask your oppinion on the virtualization of several WINDOWS 
>> servers installed on a client's medium business server room. There are 
>> about 6 crucial servers (priority, exchange, file server, and some others) 
>> that need to be accessible when they fail. Currently, each server has its 
>> own RAID storage. There is only 300GB of data to be kept on those servers 
>> (mostly exchange and file server). The virtualized servers should become 
>> alive when one of those main servers dies, and theoretically, no more than 
>> 2 VMs should be running in parallel.
>> 
>> What would be the best virtualization platform for such a requirement ? 
>> Windows 2008 server, or XEN ?
> I recommend KVM.
>> Would a fast single Xeon processor be able to handle this requirements ? 
>> 8GB or 4GB ?
> Processor power is almost certainly not the bottle neck in your setup. I 
> would guess it is disk IO. But  you really can't tell without measuring.
>> Would you consider VMWARE on top of CENTOS ?
> I assume you mean vmware server. Putting a critical resource on a freebie 
> proprietary program on top of an excellent OS but without formal support 
> contract does not sound like a good plan to me.
>
> Just get RHEL 5.4 with the (KVM based) server virtualization option.
>
> We have a setup with earlier version of KVM running for over two years 22/7 
> (no typo, they sleep nights ) as a critical system with up to 30 VMs at any 
> given time in a demanding setup. We had only a single crash (and the version 
> we used is two years old) I would run my pacemaker software on KVM if I could 
> and if I had a pacemaker ;-)
>
> Gilad.
>
>
>

-- 
  EE 77 7F 30 4A 64 2E C5  83 5F E7 49 A6 82 29 BA    ~. .~   Tk Open Systems
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      - yba at tkos.co.il - tel: +972.2.679.5364, http://www.tkos.co.il -
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