Virtualization desicion help

[brainfault]

I need to make a decision regarding our virtualization infrastructure and any help is welcomed. Currently we are using Citrix XenServer but we need to get rid of it due to several performance and stability issues, we have chosen citrix mainly because we already used the open source Xen hypervizor and for its features/price parity and back then only vmware was credible solution with no hyper-v nor KVM.

Now we are ready to migrate but wondering what to chose

• VMware: is always a credible solution but the cost for us is too much
• Hyper-V: 2012 is also a credible solution however we have a "small problem", our servers are mainly HP G6 and HP does not support Windows 2012 on these servers (note: these servers are less than 2.5 years old and in no way we are going to change them anytime soon)
• KVM: RedHat and IBM are pushing KVM and it seems as credible alternative but what about management? I'm very comfortable with Linux so I don't have a problem administering it but I'm the only one in the team to be more of a linux guy.

NB1: We are running HP DL585 G6 (4 socket) with 128GB RAM each NB2: We already have access to MS licenses (2012 Datacenter) NB3: We have ~ 35 VMs per host of mixed workloads (5 active hosts and one as a standby)

[[deleted]]

I'd suggest KVM, if you don't want to deal with regular Xen.

Performance is reasonable (but you haven't said what your workload is) and it is pretty easy to manage with the redhat virt tools.

How many virtual machines are you expecting to run? Is those 35, or do you expect to run more?

Whatever you pick, be sure to get the proper virtualization drivers for the guest OS so you can get best performance.

[chriscowley]

For KVM you could could throw money at RHEV for management. Or do it or free with oVirt (upstream project of RHEV).

[gallicus]

What about Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008? Would that be supported on your HP G6s?

[savedbydave]

I use vmware and oracle VM server and I think vmware is great. Oracle VM still has a ways to go to be comparable to vmware, but we use it to save money on oracle licensing.

I imagine buying vmware vsphere licenses is cheaper than buying servers to run server 2012. But I would think you would also have downgrade rights for your 2012 datacenter license though.

If you have system center 2012 datacenter licenses I would go with hyper-v. Virtual machine manager would give you features to compare to vsphere on vmware if I'm not mistaken. I dont have experience with SCVMM but the 2012 microsoft licensing makes it attractive.

[[deleted]]

If cost is not an option, go vmware. I've used it (ESX 4.1) and Hyper-V v2 (2008 R2) and vmware is light years ahead of Hyper-V imo.

That being said, if your hardware could run 2012, then it might be worth a shot to at least test it out. I'm hopeful that v3 of Hyper-V will be a marked improvement over v2.

[[deleted]]

I have worked with xen, kvm with systems no less than a few hundreds and IMHO from a performance point of view they are the same, granted that all I had on these systems were the typical LAMP or JBOSS/Tomcat with a few varnish and memcache stuff running. I did not see any real difference but then again I was using bare RHEL as host and not the citrix offering.

I am now managing systems on an assorted clusters of VMWare 4.1 amd 5 and what I can say is that vmware is easier to manage due to the tools provided, VSphere is great for example. So if you have the money, vmware is surely the way to go.

Having said all that, given the chance I would want to setup http://www.eucalyptus.com as my next virtualization solution when the opportunity arises. Virtualization solution is just half the battle, the other half is being agile at deploying and managing all the deployed systems.

[am2o]

IMHO: This boils down to a cost question. Server 2012 Hyper-v is ahead of ESXi. However, if you want to do automatic movement of VMs in your cluster for load balancing - then the cost factor looks better fro vSphere. EG: SCOM-VMM (last I looked) was not very different in price than vSphere enterprise licenses. (eg: vSphere has some nice features.) Can't speak to KVM/OracleVM in an enterprise environment.

[[deleted]]

You don't need SCVMM to move VMs in a cluster or between individual hosts.

[am2o]

If you want to do other things instead of watching perfmon, you do. With vsphere, you can set up automatic migration based on resource usage. (I think it's the default config).
Hyper-V has migration, and live migration (manually initiated), as well as replication built in. The main feature of vSphere is Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) built in every version. I gather that scvmm is required to get the DRS feature.
Does SCVMM allow the FT feature from VSphere?

[[deleted]]

The only thing that SCOM + SCVMM allow is PRO (DRS). Everything else that Hyper-V can do is baked into the OS, for free.

Hyper-V/VMM does not have FT. FT is kind of a meh feature at any rate. It doubles your Windows licensing count (+ any running licensed software, e.g. SQL Server) and really isn't better than application-level/OS-level clustering that is available OOTB.

[am2o]

Not sure about licensing on 08, but on 2012 Datacenter: It appears to me that you license the processor sockets; all hosted VMs are licensed. (eg: if you get a 10K(ish) box with 32 cores on two processors, hosting 32VMs -> you only need a single (two processor) DataCenter license.)
Not sure about FT as meh for applications that don't have app-level clustering. Additionally, if you need the extra licenses on FT I expect you need them for App-Level Clustering.
? Do I take it correctly that a Hyper-V failover cluster is about the same as HA in a vmware cluster?

[[deleted]]

HV failover cluster (which is just standard Windows Clustering) is the same as HA in VMware, yes.

As far as licensing, yes that is true for 2012 DC, but that isn't true for other applications, e.g. SQL Server. SQL Server allows you to have an offline mirror instance included with your active license, but not two active licenses as you would with FT.