Stephen Harris wrote:
On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 12:24:59PM -0500, Ross S. W. Walker wrote:
[mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Stephen Harris
I'm wondering what people recommend for virtual servers these days? CentOS 4 with a vserver kernel? Wait for CentOS 5 and use Xen? VMware? (Vmware is the heavy solution, but it does mean I could host a windows session if I wanted to). Or Solaris 10 and zones?
If it is a home server why not a bare-bones FC6 Xen box running CentOS guests for mail, www, ssh?
Because I don't want to play "patch catchup" when FC6 is no longer supported or have to rebuild to FC10 at some later point. I want a stable OS base that will have security patches available for a long time :-)
FWIW, I've been beating my head against Xen for a couple of weeks. *If* you want to run guest OSes that don't specifically support Xen (Windows, for instance) then you need VM support on the CPU, so fairly new recent hardware is required. Also, my experience would seem to indicate that some of the fully-virtual support in Xen and its associated tools is a little rough around the edges. For minimal pain, VMware may well be a better bet in this case.
If you're happy to stick with paravirtual guests then I'd be inclined to wait for CentOS 5, which I believe should allow you to run the same OS in both dom0 and domU straight out of the box (assuming it's anything like FC6).
I've been a VMware user for about eight years and it isn't without it's own problems, like breaking after host kernel upgrades and requiring third party patches to fix it, but it makes a good job of running Windows for the odd occasions when I really need it. If multiple VMs on a single server box is what you're after though, I think Xen is better, assuming it will play nicely. Remember also that Xen allocates physical memory to specific VMs, so if you want each VM to have a reasonable amount of memory, you need enough in the server for all of them.
James.