VMWare or Xen?
Infrastructure management, Infrastructure services, Private Cloud, Virtualization in 2010, VMware, Xen
I want to construct a small private cloud with the following configuration:
Servers: commodity 1Us as far as possible.
Running almost exclusively Linux/Apache to serve web pages. A few Windows machines in a cluster running SQL server. Three Linux machines in a cluster running Vertica. Multiple developers in multiple locations globally running assorted dev products.
We want an infrastructure that allows us to:
Deploy desktops/apps to developers and end users easily and quickly.
Flex the infrastructure we need to (i.e. transfer processing power to webservers when they need it and then to the database when the database needs it).
Create the infrastructure based on commodity hardware (we do have a quality SAN for storage but want to use cheap CPUs).
At present Xen seems to me to offer more for less money, but of course data from websites is notoriously subject to caution. Any advice or experience in the matter?
Software/Hardware used:
Software/Hardware used:
ASKED:
May 17, 2010 2:15 PM
UPDATED:
May 19, 2010 4:52 AM
Answer Wiki:
I would lean towards VMware. VMware offers an express option aimed at SMB which at caps you at MAX 3 ESX hosts which would work great for what you are doing. If I recall it was less than 1K. You would just virtualize your VC into your environment for control and then just add your systems as needed. I would create a DRS rule to keep certain machines together so network traffic is within the host and never goes outside of that host. That improves intra-host VM communication.
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This question was discussed in the LinkedIn Cloud Computing, VMWare, Virtualization and Enterprise 2.0 Group.
VMware is the king in the hyper-visor space, with Hyper-V (from Microsoft) being in second place. Everything else has a pretty small slice of the market.
You say that you don’t need vMotion or Live Migration, but if you want to be able to flex the environment and move things around without downtime then you need these functions to be able to do this.
You need to look at the features available by each vendor and look at the features that you want (both now, and a year or two from now) and then decide which one you want to use.