What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options
-
@dyasny said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
@scottalanmiller said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
I think Xen's future is to follow ESXi's path. Removing the Dom0, growing the kernel, and moving to limited, enterprise only, hardware support.
I'm pretty sure they don't have the resources to do that. Nor is there any need - Xen as a commercial offering isn't anything to write home about, and as opensource, there isn't much demand for a slim hypervisor-only OS without cluster-level management abilities. Citrix might do something like that for the same reasons ESXi is available for free - as a first dose to get people hooked, but I'm not sure they can or want to invest so much in such an offering.
They are at record support numbers now that Citrix has bowed out. Citrix was blocking that back when they were involved. Now that Citrix's sabotage of Xen is done, Xen is picking up again as people see their efforts bearing fruit.
Citrix wouldn't do that as they aren't associated with Xen. Citrix has no interest in it (and really never did.) They wanted the name to start their "brand legacy tech virtualization to confuse customers" project. Citrix doesn't do anything virtualization related anymore, just some lingering money grabs with their old XenServer, but that's long dead.
I think it is Xen's obvious future. Xen has a lot going for it, but they need to leapfrog others to be seriously relevant.
-
@scottalanmiller I frankly doubt there is much of a chance for Xen making anything worthwhile these days. With containers taking over most workloads and things like firecracker popping up, even KVM is losing ground. Openstack, the main locomotive for KVM adoption, isn't the cool new cloud platform any longer, and even it is adopting k8s and containers under the hood.
I think virtualization will become a niche platform technology in a few years, and if MS keep at their current direction, we might even see a common platform, where MS Windows 25 and Linux have the same base kernel and can easily run in the same container. We'll see
-
@dyasny said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
@scottalanmiller I frankly doubt there is much of a chance for Xen making anything worthwhile these days. With containers taking over most workloads and things like firecracker popping up, even KVM is losing ground. Openstack, the main locomotive for KVM adoption, isn't the cool new cloud platform any longer, and even it is adopting k8s and containers under the hood.
KVM's focus is definitely Windows workloads that are bloated and can't be made thinner like we see in the Linux world.
-
@dyasny said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
I think virtualization will become a niche platform technology in a few years, and if MS keep at their current direction, we might even see a common platform, where MS Windows 25 and Linux have the same base kernel and can easily run in the same container. We'll see
I agree. Full virtualization and even the Windows kernel itself have seen their day. The future is lighter, faster, and more converged.
-
For those not familiar with Firecracker, it's a container (Type C) virtualization technology focused on server-less computing like AWS Lambda. It is open source under Apache 2.0 and sponsored by Amazon.
-
@scottalanmiller said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
KVM's focus is definitely Windows workloads that are bloated and can't be made thinner like we see in the Linux world.
Not really, I see a lot of KVM on large public openstack deployments (think digitalocean or vultr or whatever) and also in private DCs. Been migrating customers from VMWare and Xen to KVM for years, probably tens of thousands of hosts, if not hundreds, with most of those workloads being Linux VMs. That is pretty much where containers are taking a bit out of all other hypervisors' pie, with workloads becoming shorter lived and more ad-hoc and micro-servicy, this tendency will only grow.
-
@scottalanmiller its basically just a replacement for QEMU, still using the same KVM, but more lightweight and much faster. Less features of course. So you end up with a lightweight (compared to QEMU) emulation plus a KVM hypervisor.
-
@dyasny said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
@scottalanmiller said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
KVM's focus is definitely Windows workloads that are bloated and can't be made thinner like we see in the Linux world.
Not really, I see a lot of KVM on large public openstack deployments (think digitalocean or vultr or whatever) and also in private DCs.
Most of those are Windows focused. If they didn't want to support Windows, they'd go to LXC. KVM is a lot of overhead that only makes sense when Windows is in their game plans, or potentially ISO support. Vultr and OpenStack are almost completely doing this because of their Windows options. IMHO
-
@dyasny said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
Been migrating customers from VMWare and Xen to KVM for years, probably tens of thousands of hosts, if not hundreds, with most of those workloads being Linux VMs.
Most, but Windows is a taint here. Any Windows means you need KVM. Even if only one out of thousands of workloads. Unless you want different solutions for different workloads, which a lot of places want to avoid.
-
@scottalanmiller said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
Most of those are Windows focused. If they didn't want to support Windows, they'd go to LXC. KVM is a lot of overhead that only makes sense when Windows is in their game plans, or potentially ISO support. Vultr and OpenStack are almost completely doing this because of their Windows options. IMHO
No, not at all. There is a fair bit of Windows used here and there, but the main guest OS is Linux.
LXC is actually very rare in production (LXD is even rare-er).
-
@dyasny said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
LXC is actually very rare in production (LXD is even rare-er).
Because nearly everyone has Windows somewhere. Only completely Windows-less shops can consider a pure LXC environment.
-
@scottalanmiller said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
Most, but Windows is a taint here. Any Windows means you need KVM. Even if only one out of thousands of workloads. Unless you want different solutions for different workloads, which a lot of places want to avoid.
A cloud provider can potentially create a system where if you pick Linux you get a container and if you pick Windows you get a VM, sure. But that's not how this is done today. Most cloud providers don't even touch containers outside a container specific system, like AKS/GKE (or the old school VPS based on Parallels/OVZ). Instead they simply give you a choice of guest OS and instance type, and you always get a proper VM.
-
@dyasny said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
@scottalanmiller said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
Most of those are Windows focused. If they didn't want to support Windows, they'd go to LXC. KVM is a lot of overhead that only makes sense when Windows is in their game plans, or potentially ISO support. Vultr and OpenStack are almost completely doing this because of their Windows options. IMHO
No, not at all. There is a fair bit of Windows used here and there, but the main guest OS is Linux.
Here and there... that requires that it be accommodated. Like I said, Windows is a taint. Any Windows means you have to do something special to handle it.
-
@scottalanmiller no, that's because there aren't any LXC-based VPS hosting solutions out there
Even OVZ is more common -
@dyasny said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
@scottalanmiller said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
Most, but Windows is a taint here. Any Windows means you need KVM. Even if only one out of thousands of workloads. Unless you want different solutions for different workloads, which a lot of places want to avoid.
A cloud provider can potentially create a system where if you pick Linux you get a container and if you pick Windows you get a VM, sure. But that's not how this is done today. Most cloud providers don't even touch containers outside a container specific system, like AKS/GKE (or the old school VPS based on Parallels/OVZ). Instead they simply give you a choice of guest OS and instance type, and you always get a proper VM.
Right, because they want a single system to maintain rather than two. It makes sense. But that's my point...
People almost always want...
- A single platform.
- The option for Windows.
-
@dyasny said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
@scottalanmiller no, that's because there aren't any LXC-based VPS hosting solutions out there
Even OVZ is more commonBecause they want to support Windows. Either already do, or are prepared for the future.
-
HostFav does LXC for their cloud, with a KVM option. They still want to support Windows, but were willing to give in on the "single platform" option.
-
@scottalanmiller well, in any case - that's where you get KVM from most providers. You want docker - you either deploy your own on cloud VMs or use GKE or whatever. I've never even seen LXC as an option
-
@dyasny said in What would your recommendation be for a Type 1 Hypervisor - including backup and restoration options:
@scottalanmiller well, in any case - that's where you get KVM from most providers. You want docker - you either deploy your own on cloud VMs or use GKE or whatever. I've never even seen LXC as an option
Right, but of course you don't. I keep explaining why you don't and won't see it. But you keep responding with the result being exactly what I said.
-
And why do many of us choose Vultr? Because it provides a Windows option is a major reason. Sure the price is great and the reliability is great, but not having to have a different provider for different things is a major driver too. Even if we only have one Windows workload out of however many other things, it only takes one.
