I agree with Nataraj about kvm/qemu/libvirt, we have 10+ hypervisors running it and it meets our needs but none of them are particularly heavily loaded. The only caution I would give is that there are occasions (mainly in the snapshot-associated arena) where the man page may simply say "do this" but, when you run the command on a distribution focusing on longer term support, you find it's not yet supported. And there are areas where Red Hat flatly states that there are issues (snapshots of the operating environment rather that just disk images). While this is true (for example, reverting to a snapshot reverts causes the system to have the date/time of the revert as well), we have still found value in these kinds of snapshots in a development environment. 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If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately by e-mail and delete all copies of the message. ________________________________________ From: CentOS <centos-bounces at centos.org> on behalf of Gregory P. Ennis <PoMec at PoMec.Net> Sent: Sunday, July 1, 2018 9:53 PM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [CentOS] Centos 7.5 on Vmware On 06/28/2018 02:03 PM, Gregory P. Ennis wrote: > Everyone, > > I am in the initial study phase of putting together a larger virtual > server while using Centos 7.5 as the operating system of choice for > the > individual virtual machines. > > How do you all like VMware for this, or what other software allows > for > the development of virtural servers that use Centos 7.5 > > Thanks ahead of time for giving me a head start with your > experiences!!!! > It would be helpful if you gave more details about what you were looking for? Are you planning to run a bare metal hypervisor, or vmware under Linux or windows? What are you performance requirements? IO? CPU? What will the VM's be used for? Do guests requre a graphics console? Various vmware products ranging from ESXI to vmware workstation are very popular. I've run several of them. They work. I now use the Linux included, kvm/qemu based Red Hat/CentOS virtualization and it meets my needs very well for general testing/development, email server, web server kind of stuff. I also use this setup along with spice to run test systems with various graphic GUI's. I would not say that my virt servers are very heavily loaded. I have a Dell R210 running CentOS6 KVM/Qemu and a Dell XPS 9360 running Ubuntu 18.04 with kvm/qemu. If you prefer fancy mangement GUI's over writing scripts and editing config files, vmware might be better for you. kvm/qemu does include virt-manager which is a fairly simply GUI to create and manage VM's, but the user interface is not as comprehensive as the interface for managing ESXi. Red Hat does have their high end virtualization products, of which I believe at least 1 is a bare metal hypervisor. I have no personal experience with those products, though if client came to me with need, I would examine and seriously consider the Redhat products. One advantage to the kvm/qemu solution or possibly the redhat virtualization product is more integrated support. When I ran vmware, I used to run into situations where I wanted to beta test the newest release of some random linux distribution only to find out that vmware had not yet implemented support for the graphics driver or some other new hardware feature being used in the OS that I was trying to test. In this way, kvm/qemu feels more integrated. Like other software, kvm/qemu has bugs here and there, but overall, I'm very happy with it and I like the price of using it under CentOS and Ubuntu. I see clients all the time, go out and spend a fortune on huge vmware clusters, that end up very lightly loaded and could easily be run on a simple kvm/qemu server running under CentOS (or even one of the desktop virtualization solutions) with a backup server for redundancy, so I suggest to consider what your requirements really are. You could always go with Redhat if you require support. Nataraj --------------------------------------------------------- Nataraj, Thank you very much for your comments. I have not put together a virtual machine at this point, so my tree structure of logic is still very weak. However, I have three Centos 7.5 machines and one Centos 5.10 that could reasonably function together. Actually the plan has been to upgrade the Centos 5.10 which is a database server to Centos 7.5. Currently this is on a SuperMicro SCSI and we planned to purchase a new machine with SATA drives because 7.5 does not install on SCSI drives. While planning for this change we thought of looking a virtual systems on one larger unit. The other units that are already running 7.5 are a mail/archive server, a gateway that controls all of the traffic in and out of the network, and a backup server. These units service about 30 users, and all machines have heavy use :) (ok at least by my standards). Thank you again for your recommendations!!!!! Greg _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS at centos.org https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos