Re: [Xen-users] Xen or KVM

[Joseph Glanville <joseph.glanville@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 16 May 2012 19:49, Arindam Choudhury <arindam@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am new to virtualization and I am having the obvious hassle of choosing
> between Xen and KVM.
>
> Can Xen experts help me with this?
>
> Regards,
>
> Arindam
>
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-users mailing list
> Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://lists.xen.org/xen-users


As a personal opinion, Xen is lightyears ahead of other solutions for
our needs (complex high-performance hosting).
But it really depends on what you are doing. KVM is a simple solution
for a simple problem, Xen is slightly less simple can but solve
arbitarily difficult problems and is considerably more mature + better
performance.
However if all you want to do is play around with virtualisation or
use different operating systems at the same time on your desktop then
KVM is more than capable and is likely to be less work and easier to
understand.
In those sorts of situations simply using what you are most
comfortable with is what I would advise.. for me that would still be
Xen.

When push comes to shove in production deployments Xen has shown its
metal for many years now and I wouldn't even dream of building a
solution around KVM or VMWare, features like Flask/XSM, ability to
dissaggregate driver domains and a very powerful CPU
scheduler/weighting system are only a few reasons why to choose Xen.
As Luke has already mentioned this sort of capability is vital for
managing noisy neighbor in both public hosting/cloud situations and
also private clusters where a runaway application can slow all
machines on a physical host.

The big reason for us is performance, Xens implementation of
paravirtualised storage and network drivers surpasses what is
available on other hypervisors. Virtio is still immature and a long
way behind Xen's blkback for random IO performance.

Naturally I am biased though, I love Xen and we have -alot- of Xen boxes. :)

Joseph.

-- 
CTO | Orion Virtualisation Solutions | www.orionvm.com.au
Phone: 1300 56 99 52 | Mobile: 0428 754 846

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