Looking for KVM consultant

[Gilboa Davara]

On Sun, 2011-04-03 at 10:41 +0300, Tom Rosenfeld wrote:
> Hi guys,
> We are looking for help setting up KVM in our production environment.
> We have been using Vserver, but want to move to KVM which has many
> more tools for management.
> 
> Our initial tests under CentOS 5.4 have not been good. The KVM guests
> often hang when they are under load.
> 
> Any recommendations?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> 
> Tom Rosenfeld

Hi Tom,

A couple of questions:

1. Are you talking about Internet facing environment or are you talking
about an internal server?

2. What are you planning to run on the server(s)? Linux VM's? Windows
VM's? What level of support do you require?

3. As others have mentioned, CentOS 5.4 is getting old, I'd use CentOS
5.5 instead.

4. Beyond that, given the difficulties CentOS is having in releasing
both CentOS 5.6 and CentOS 6 (RHEL 6.1 has already in beta testing while
CentOS developers have no clear roadmap for CentOS 5.6 and 6.0 release).

5. Having said all that, I'd either:
a. Buy RHEL 6.0 (if you require small number of VM's)
b. Buy RHEV 2.2 (if you require better support and/or larger number of
VM's; should be twice as expensive as RHEL 6.0)
c. Use Fedora 14/x86_64. (If you don't mind the 13 month-long support
cycle or this is an internal server that doesn't require daily patching)
d. Switch to another distro (SLES?)
e. Switch to CentOS + VMWare server.

In my case, I usually opt for Fedora for in-office [1] use and RHEL for
out-office use. But than again, I will be able to give far better advise
with some additional information.

- Gilboa
[1] Using our own VM deployment and configuration scripts as opposed to
use virt-manager.
-- 
Gilboa Davara
http://www.wirex-systems.com