I am lucky in that I get to work in the most cutting edge areas of the hosting industry thus getting to see the latest and greatest technologies and work on them everyday. One of the areas where the envelope is being pushed is virtualization. I work daily with Hyper -v, Vmware ,  OpenVZ &Virtuozzo, Sun virtualbox and Xen.  Below, I will give a short summary of each one.

1. Microsoft Hyper -V – Microsoft Hyper -v is a newcomer to the virtualization arena. Based upon my experiences with it it, it is very fast, has a very easy to use gui and excels at running windows virtual machines. I think the biggest benefit to those who wish to use thi sproduct is the licensing aspect of it. If you install windows 2008 64bit datacenter edition with hyper -v you will have free licensing of windows guests. For those of us who know how much M$ licensing costs, this is a huge bonus. On the downside, Linux support is not so good and it does not support smp on Linux guests and the only supported non-windows OS is Suse Enterprise (sorry redhat). Will redhat work? Definitely but if it breaks, good luck getting support. Another thing to note with this product is that your system must support intel virtualization technology. If it doesn’t, hyper -v will not start at all.

2. VMware – VMware is one of my favorites, so I may not be quite fair with this one. VMware has multiple products including ESX, ESX-i and VMware server and workstation and can run on Linux or Windows. ESX is a enterprise hypervisor that require intel virtulization to be enabled. It runs on a redhat 4.x base that is stripped to the core ( too much in my opinion) Tools like ethool and others are completely missing from this OS. The system itself is controlled by the vmware infastructure client which is very intuitive and super easy to use.  VMware ESX-i is the non enterpise free version of ESX and has a strip down of features but is also good. My favorite is VMware server, which is a free virtualization server that can be ran on any host with sufficient resources. What I like about this particular product is the easy to use web interface,  the ability to use the virtual infastructure client with it, and it is a great platform for somone to experiment if you are learning a new skill or OS. etc – VMware will run almost anything, and is the most felixible virtualization platform there is.

3. OpenVZ & Virtuozzo – I bundled these together because OpenVZ is the open source and free version of Virtuozzo. Virtuozzo is a enterprise level virtualization solution from parallels that supports Linux or Window but both. I have rarely seen the Windows version used in my enviornment so I dont know s mcuh about it. The Linux version on the other hand, I am very familiar with.  The Linux products runs guest virtual machines called VE’s ( virtual enviornments) and they are essesntially virtual containers that share the same kernel as the host server. For Linux virtualization, this solution is the fastest, however certain software can be very difficult to install as the VZ kernel is custom built  custom compiled kernel modules have to be used.  The gui for virtuozzo is too complex in my opinion and has a large leraning curve. Licensing is also expensive. This virtualization solution is great for hosting sites etc. OpenVZ has no gui but has 3rd party products that can be purchased through other vendors to give you virtuozzo capabilities for much cheaper. These products do not require intl virtualization technology and can be run on any host with sufficient resources.

4. Sun Virtualbox - This product is not widely used at this time, and I personally do not find it suited for a server room in it’s current capacity, but it is very cool still. I use this on my laptop to fire up practice virtual’s for education purposes. This product has a nice, very easy to use gui but doesnt seem to have the tools available for a server enviornment.  It does not require intel virtulization technology.  Check it out here

5. Xen – there are many products out there revolving around the Xen core. Xen is a very powerful, felixible virtualization solution that can be run with or without intel virtualization technology ( though benfits in speed are gained with it) Xen can run just about anything like vmware, however I have heard that windows guests do not perform nearly as quickly as they do on other virtulization solutions. Xen runs on a customer Linux kernel and is a very high performance option.

In closing – Some people may completely disagree with my assessment above and that is ok, there is many different products out there and it is best to use the one you are most comfortable with! I hope that my small post brings to light some details on these products.  If you have any questions please comment! – Dustin

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