[CentOS-virt] KVM vs ESXi

Wed May 18 12:58:56 UTC 2011
Drew <drew.kay at gmail.com>

Morning Everyone,

I'm busy doing a rebuild of my home server and am tossing between
VMware and KVM for this build. I already have experience with ESX, we
use it at work, but I'm debating trying out KVM for a while. The
server itself is a budget build using a Supermicro X8SAX board w/
i7-950 & 12GB RAM, LSI 3081 SAS RAID (1068e based), rolled into a
NorcoTek 16 Bay SAS case. Not fancy but also decent enough for home
use. I don't expect high performance out of this unit so unless the
gear is hopelessly outclassed, I'm not in a position to entertain
upgrading. Right now forking over $1000-$1500 on a $2000 system for a
pair of higher end LSI/3ware/Acreca controller just isn't in the
budget. ;-)

My question to everyone are these:

-How well does KVM support Windows Guests? I'm already running a
Server 2008r2 and WHS 2011 (based on 08r2) machines at home which I
want to consolidate into this box.

-Does KVM have a concept of virtual switches and and are they tied to
physical NICs? ESXi allows me to create a vSwitch that isn't tied to a
physical NIC so I can create a DMZ that exists solely within the host
system. I'd like to replicate that if possible.

I know these are probably questions that I could answer on my own by
RTFM but I have already, and never really got the answers I needed.
Pretty much every how-to assumed I'd be doing basic stuff and not
dabbling with advanced stuff. I also know that what's written doesn't
always match what's in the field and you folks are the field. And with
CentOS 6 just around the corner (no flame wars please, my nomex pants
are at the cleaners :-P ) I'm wanting to know if it's worth holding
off another month or so on finalizing my build.

Thanks,


-- 
Drew

"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood."
--Marie Curie