I’ve been playing around with various virtualization products. This past Feb 23, 2009 Citrix announced their XenServer product was going to be free. I’ve been trying ESXi, Xen Opensolaris dom0, Windows 2008 Hyper-v and Hyper-V Server, so I figured I’d give XenServer a try. I figured since it was a commercial product it likely was going to be fairly polished. I’ve been using for a week or so now and am fairly impressed.
I’ve been fighting with my storage so I haven’t really had a chance to test out the real features but what I have seen so far I kind of like. My experiences basically are this:
ESXi: worked on my dual Opteron 246 machine. But I only had 2GB of ram, so I couldn’t effectively put loads of vm’s on it. However, ESXi didn’t work on any of my other hardware. Kind of irritating but oddly enough, I’ve tried to run it again on my opteron machine and now for some reason it doesn’t work now. I’ve also had mixed results running it on some hp equipment at work (like identical non-certified machines, 1 able to run it the other not while getting weird cpu heartbeat errors and freezing). Anyhow, I’ve given up on ESXi for now. VMWare although loads of people seem to love them, I’m thinking they are going to have troubles with all the pressure from Microsoft, Citrix, and xen.
Hyper-V Server and Windows 2008 Hyper-V: I like this product. It’s what we’re using at the office and seems to work well. HVS is a nice free alternative for Windows guests. Poor Linux/other OS support but not bad for a Windows environment. It works well at the office though since we’re pretty much Windows and SLES. Just run datacenter and you’re set.
Xen on opensolaris. Didn’t work so well. I got some vm’s running, but performance didnt seem there as I had some troubles getting paravirtualized vm’s going. I kind of gave up as I was spending too much time working on them and XenServer was freed.
More later on Citrix XenServer.
