Proxmox, Mirantis Openstack, KVM, oh my
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@Kelly said:
Hmm, I had read some things that were very critical of Xen in general because of the way it has been controlled by the larger players and made mostly to suit their needs. Perhaps I need to add it back in to my list of options.
Funny, that's actually a concern with KVM, rather than Xen. Xen was academic and purely open source. KVM was built to support the big corporate players. KVM is guided by enormous companies, Xen mostly by the cloud players.
Xen is what powers Amazon, Rackspace and IBM clouds. KVM powers Digital Ocean and Vultr.
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So Xen or community XenServer? Is there a difference?
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@Kelly said:
@scottalanmiller said:
If you are going to go cloud, of course OpenStack is where to start. Once you go there, you have to choose your hypervisor. Xen and KVM are the choices there. Both work fine.
Any thoughts on Mirantis vs other packages vs vanilla OpenStack?
Have not played enough to say. I'd be likely to look at Ubuntu and Suse packages.
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@Kelly said:
So Xen or community XenServer? Is there a difference?
Community XenServer has a fantastic management console as well as a ton of CLI commands to make management easier. I'm still not sure I understand the difference completely no matter how many times @scottalanmiller explains it.
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@Kelly said:
So Xen or community XenServer? Is there a difference?
Yes. One is a kernel, one is a distro.
Xen is just the hypervisor a la Linux. XenServer is the official distro made by Citrix and Xen themselves that has everything that you need to actually use Xen a la CentOS.
So Xen is to Linux as XenServer is to CentOS.
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XenServer is Xen + CentOS Dom0 + XAPI + installer + some extra tools.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Kelly said:
So Xen or community XenServer? Is there a difference?
Yes. One is a kernel, one is a distro.
Xen is just the hypervisor a la Linux. XenServer is the official distro made by Citrix and Xen themselves that has everything that you need to actually use Xen a la CentOS.
So Xen is to Linux as XenServer is to CentOS.
Ah, this makes sense I was trying to articulate this in my head and couldn't. Thanks for the clarification.
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So what is it about XenServer that makes it preferred over KVM particularly for Linux workloads?
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@Kelly said:
So what is it about XenServer that makes it preferred over KVM particularly for Linux workloads?
Performance. KVM works hard to make Windows fast. Xen works hard to make Linux fast.
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Great, thanks for all the input. I appreciate it.
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Just so I'm clear on the XenServer stuff... XenCenter (the management tool that is equivalent to VMware's vSphere) has also been open sourced, right?
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@dafyre said:
Just so I'm clear on the XenServer stuff... XenCenter (the management tool that is equivalent to VMware's vSphere) has also been open sourced, right?
I don't think so. It is included in the XenServer package but wasn't one of the tools that was open sourced.
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According to http://xenserver.org/partners/developing-products-for-xenserver/21-xencenter-development/88-xc-dev-home.html it appears to be.
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@dafyre said:
Just so I'm clear on the XenServer stuff... XenCenter (the management tool that is equivalent to VMware's vSphere) has also been open sourced, right?
No, it is free but not open source.
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@coliver said:
@dafyre said:
Just so I'm clear on the XenServer stuff... XenCenter (the management tool that is equivalent to VMware's vSphere) has also been open sourced, right?
I don't think so. It is included in the XenServer package but wasn't one of the tools that was open sourced.
Citrix does not own it to open it.
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@Kelly said:
According to http://xenserver.org/partners/developing-products-for-xenserver/21-xencenter-development/88-xc-dev-home.html it appears to be.
Oh, that's news good to know.
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@Kelly said:
According to http://xenserver.org/partners/developing-products-for-xenserver/21-xencenter-development/88-xc-dev-home.html it appears to be.
Oh neat, that is new. Maybe they finally got everything cleared to open it.
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@Kelly said:
According to http://xenserver.org/partners/developing-products-for-xenserver/21-xencenter-development/88-xc-dev-home.html it appears to be.
Maybe now we will see a decent *nix version of it. Although the CLI commands are pretty easy to use.
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@coliver would be awesome. Someone needs to get on that. Although the XAPI has been there for a long time and no one has made the interface that we want yet.
Really running on Linux is pointless, what is needed is a web interface. Anything else is just silly.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver would be awesome. Someone needs to get on that. Although the XAPI has been there for a long time and no one has made the interface that we want yet.
Really running on Linux is pointless, what is needed is a web interface. Anything else is just silly.
Xen Orchestra is around but they have a silly limitation on the number of hosts it can manage.
