[CentOS] Virtualization platform choice

[Jerry Franz]

On 03/27/2011 02:57 AM, Jussi Hirvi wrote:
> Some may be bored with the subject - sorry...
>
> Still not decided about virtualization platform for my "webhotel v2"
> (ns, mail, web servers, etc.).
>
> KVM would be a natural way to go, I suppose, only it is too bad CentOS 6
> will not be out in time for me - I guess KVM would be more mature in
> CentOS 6.
>
> Any experience with the free "VMware vSphere Hypervisor"?. (It was
> formerly known as "VMware ESXi Single Server" or "free ESXi".)
>
> http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html
>
> I would need a tutorial about that... For example, does that run without
> a host OS? Can it be managed only via Win clients? Issues with CentOS
> 4/5 guests (all my systems are currently CentOS 4/5).
I'm currently using Ubuntu Server 10.04-LTS as a host for KVM running 
CentOS5.5 guests I migrated from VMware Server 2. Works fine. A nice 
feature of current generation KVM is that you are supposed to be able to 
do live migration even without shared storage (although I haven't tested 
that yet). I wrote some custom scripts to allow me to take LVM snapshots 
for whole-image backups and I'm pretty happy with the who setup.

The only corners I encountered were

1) A lack of documentation on how to configure bridging over bonded 
interfaces for the host server. It turned out to be fairly easy - just 
not clearly documented anyplace I could find.

2) The default configuration for rebooting/shutting dow the host server 
just 'shoots the guests in the head' rather than having them shutdown 
cleanly. :( You will want to write something to make sure they get 
shutdown properly instead.

-- 
Benjamin Franz