[CentOS] Centos 7.5 on Vmware

[Nataraj]

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