[CentOS] Virtualization - what do You recommend?

Tue Feb 2 16:43:36 UTC 2010
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

Rafa? Radecki wrote:
> Hi All.
>
> I plan to use virtualization in my production environment. I plan to 
> use one of the following options:
> - KVM;
> - VMWare Esxi;
> - VMWare Workstation.
>
> I plan to install Windows 2008 as a guest. I want to use something 
> like LVM snapshots for backups. Stability is also very important, the 
> guest will be used as a production server.
> Which option could You recommend and why?

does KVM in CentOS have native virtualization 'drivers' for Win2008 
server? if not, I wouldn't run it in a production environment.

I wouldn't use Vmware Server/Workstation for a production server, 
either. I found VMWare server 2.x quite unstable on a number of 
different configurations, and the performance is considerably lower than 
the native hypervisor style virtualization like ESX(i)

VMWare ESX(i), assuming your hardware is supported, works great. Rock 
solid, very good performance, excellent support for windows, linux, 
solaris, etc guests. VMware supports copy-on-write snapshots, too.

re backups, you do know Windows Server has its own snapshot feature for 
taking backups, known as VSS (Volume Snapshot Services) ?

do note, snapshots are an AID to backups, they aren't a substitute for 
proper offsite archived backups for emergency recovery. For instance, 
they won't protect against system hardware failure. Any, a volume with 
too many snapshots pending tends to bog down considerably in disk IO 
performance.