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Hey Spiceheads,

I’m looking at virtulisaing my current physical 2K8RC2 Box, However ive running on a rather tight budget, and dont have oodles of money for a new server, or vmwares lovley licensing!

So i’m trying to do it on the cheap… i know its not always the best way, But we all have to start from somewhere, Ive worked down to the hypervisor i’m looking at: XenServer, XenHypervisor or ESXi

Ive had a look at this: http://virtualization.findthebest.com/compare/7-35/Citrix-XenServer-Free-Edition-vs-Xen-Hypervisor

  • Ive Ruled out Hyper-v as you cant get HyperV 2012 to connect to Windows Seven using RSAT and have NO intention of upgrading my work machine to Windows Eight (well just yet)
    But would like to know which would you pick out of XenServer or XenHypervisor and Why?

My Current layout is:

3x Sunfure X2200 M2s,
One as PDC
Two as BDC
Three as Admin SIMS and FMS

My Long term goal is to have the lot under a virtual roof, As for backup and recovery it makes my job, very easy Just having to move backups around. Also it gives me a little more freedom to experiment with new OS’s As i can create them on a test bed, without having to use actual hardware, and also allows for future moves of Inhouse Website and Exchange server,

Just wanted to know your ideas and opinions =)
I’m looking to do the “virtual move” over the 19th-23rd August - Starting with my Primary DC and maybe a Second Virtual and One Dedicated Box, But leaving the admin side just for now,

Cheers

Simon

@VMware

6 Spice ups
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From my experience, I’d prefer VMware over Xen. My opinion is biased, based on my history with the two:

Two jobs ago we had installed XenServer on Nexenta Storage. It worked quite well, was very fast, but required constant fettling and faffing to get the best out of it. There was one chap on the team who was very sharp on it, and when he moved to pastures new, the maintenance and ‘faffing’ dwindled. Combined with poor support from the supplier, it made for a sour experience when the reliability dropped and the hosts were up and down or ringfenced quite frequently.

I converted the storage boxes to JBODs and moved the hosts to HyperV, and the setup and reliability were way better. The only downside was that due to the lack of original shared storage - each host had local storage only.

So I’m not keen on Xen - but my experience is not due to it being less capable - it wasn’t optimally implemented and managed.

But, even so, I’ll stick with the major players. Both the HyperV and ESXi hypervisors can be had for free - you just need to make sure you license the guests running on them. Of course as soon as you want the sexy features, then the licensing costs come in to play.

When I’ve used VMware, it’s been solid and reliable - both in production environments and in my labs - it stands up to my abuse and hamfisted way of working with it.

My 0.02c, good luck with the deployment!

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On a side note, install Hyper-V 2008. That way you can use Windows 7 to manage it.

1 Spice up
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Simon,

Licensing becomes your biggest concern if your doing this on the cheap. If your already running Windows Server 2012 then you have licenses for Hyper-V, but you are limited to how many virtual machines you can run on them unless you happen to have the datacenter license in which case you can run as many as you like.

If you decide to use XenServer, which is what I’m currently using in my network you run into the issue of having to essentially blow away an existing server to install the XenServer on. You’d actually want to have 2 if you plan on doing any motioning of the virtual machines.

Interesting enough, I was down in Orlando at CiscoLive! this year and was talking to both the Cisco UCS and the Flexpod experts about server virtualization. In both cases, the recommendation was VMware, followed by Hyper-V 2012, followed by XenServer followed by Hyper-V 2008 R2. The reasoning was that Hyper-V 2012 has improved significantly and is more efficient then XenServer now, and is cheaper then VMware. Cisco owns part of VMware so I kind of discounted that, but the Flexpod engineers were compelling, especially since one of them, Rachel Zhu writes their white papers on using XenServer with Citrix VDI solutions.

Hardware to host your virtual machines will also be an issue, storage, memory and CPU all play a crucial role in the success of your virtualization solution. Over subscribing the memory, and CPUs can help with the density of clients per host, but can cause some major issues if you discover your virtuals are using more then you planned for at the same time.

I’d still recommend XenServer, version 6.2 just was released, and it’s now open source meaning you get the bells and whistles for free. You even get the XenCenter management console. My real reason for recommending XenServer however is the practical reason that my team, including myself already know how to drive it, no steep learning curve, and contrary to JK We don’t spend a lot of time tweeking it, once you install it, let it run. I will admit the earlier versions had some Dom0 issues that required some tweeks, but for the most part once you install it it just runs, which is also my experience with Hyper-V from my pilot days.

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There is no product called XenHypervisor. There is Xen, the hypervisor, but please do not try to make up new terms, this will only confuse you and other people.

XenServer is the now completely free and open source virtualization product from the Xen team. Just as there is a hypervisor under the hood of HyperV and vSphere, Xen is this to XenServer.

So today, unless you are a virtualization expert looking to build your own virtualization platform based on Xen, you use XenServer if Xen is the hypervisor that you want.

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What? Don’t understand. you can run Windows on any hypervisor.

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Pretty sure VMware and XenServer are the major players. HyperV is the new upstart trying to cut in on their marketshare. Maybe you’ve heard of this “cloud” thing going on… that’s all stemming from Xen.

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They do? Last I knew they were a complete division of EMC and they new networking stuff is competing with Cisco.

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If you are going free, XenServer without a doubt. No question at all. If you have some budget, vSphere Essentials is great at $520 for up to three servers. but if free is a requirement, don’t even consider anything but XenServer.

3 Spice ups
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I think the point here was that you can manage Hyper-V 2008 R2 using RSAT on Windows 7. 2012 really needs you to use Windows 8 for full functionality.

2 Spice ups
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Oh, as a management environment, I see. Oh boy, I’d not recommend going to a significantly less stable and less powerful hypervisor just out of a desire to avoid the Microsoft future desktop system. That’s a really unhealthy “clinging to a vendor” while “dissing that vendor’s vision” combination that will only end in tears.

1 Spice up
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Sorry for butting in, but I have a question.

I keep seeing Hyper-V followed by “you need a datacenter license” and I’m confused.

What are the limits? I thought Hyper-V was free, similar to Xen Server?

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It is, people get really confused mixing Windows licenses with their hypervisor which is unrelated.

What Tim is saying is true, but convoluted. It has nothing to do with HyperV. He’s just talking about Windows Standard vs. Windows Datacenter unrelated to the hypervisor. The licensing is identical, like you said, whether HyperV, VMware or XenServer (or anything else.) Windows licensing is unrelated to the hypervisor.

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I would go with either XenServer or HyperV Server (its free).

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Can you comment on why you would choose XenServer over free Hyper-V?

I’m struggling with this decision myself. I have some ESXi 4.1 (free) boxes, one XenServer and am just testing Hyper-V

I need to pick one, and get standardized on a very thin budget.

Upgrading to the newest ESXi will give us thin provisioning, but cap the RAM at 32Gb Adding Essentials would give us backup APIs so we could use Unitrends and some 3rd party tools (Trilead etc.) but may be cost-prohibitive on our 2 4-cpu servers if I remember the licensing model correctly…

Hyper-V looks promising, seems very full-featured, though a bit of a PITA to manage.

XenServer has been working well, no complaints, though our backup system (Unitrends) won’t talk to it other thn to the guest OSes. There seems to be little support from backup vendors, and not many 3rd party tools that I’m aware of, though I’m no expert by any means.

Don’t mean to hijack the thread, but since you made the comment… :slight_smile:

1 Spice up
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Maturity, features and because it is actually free… the entire ecosystem, not just the basics. HyperV requires expensive add ons to manage on scale, XenServer does not, for example.

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XenServer doesn’t have the backup API like vSphere and HyperV. But it can be backed up by Unitrends, just requires more work as the backup mechanism is different there.

PHDVirtual handles XenServer.

1 Spice up
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Thanks very much for the replies! I really appreciate it.

Since we’re a max of about 5 or 6 physical hypervisors, can I assume “scale” applies to much bigger implementations?

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This question is harder to answer than appears.

First, your choice is

  1. ESXi - hardware virtualization

  2. XenServer 6.2 - Paravirtualization

Each effective, both free, each having drastic differences regarding drivers, storage “options”, and depends on what you wish to run on the “top of stack” - Desktops? Servers only? Virtual Infrastructure?

I leverage both depending on customer requirements.

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Some critical clarification added to the above.