I'm about to change my servers, and I'm considering using Virtualization. But I still checking on both solution.
Anyone of you use VMWare or Xen for your servers?
Do you like it?
What are cons or plus for both of them?
Thanks
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Hard to say when it comes directly from VMware. I don't think they would say that their product is slower than the others... Though, it's interesting.
There's is something that is troubling me, on Xen installing document, they recommend using conventionnal backup system. I know that it's the best solution for AD or things like that. But in my case, there are some VM that I would like to backup the entire VM to make it quicly available if it fails. Like a copy that I could re-activate incase of a problem. What do you think about that?
Best be would be VMWare, ESX installs on the bare metal then you can take snapshots all throughout the day or one time a day (providing you have enough storage space) it can do this while the server is running so essentially you could take a snapshot and have it go to a SAN or NAS or Tape for backup. IF it blows up pull the most recent snapshot drop it in activate and go.
ESX Enterprise is awesome. The Consolidated backup, V2P, P2V, all great tools! You can take instant snapshots of servers on the fly before changes or to test changes. You can run conventional backup clients on it as well. Im not sure about Xen but one thing to keep in mind is that ESX needs resources to be effective. We run it on two DL's with 36GB of RAM. We do not really budget for physical servers anymore. We budget for storage.
From my own experience I would say VMware is the better option for production environments at the moment. If has a long track record of excelence and broad vendor backing. Also the stability and performance the VI3/ESX platform give are better then with XEN.
If you are an open source fan and your company accepts open source as an alternative XEN has the better financial picture, but in a commercial environment I would opt for the VMware option.
As for backup, I use conventional backup to back up my user data within the VM and I use the snapshot technology for backing up the full VM in my maintance and patch plans. So before any install/patch I snapshot do the patch and if not ok revert back to the snapshot.
I don't like the consolidated backup from VMWare mainly because it's a backup tool without a proper restore function last I checked.
I'm assuming you mean ESX when you say VMware. If cost is a concern then take a look at VMware Server. It's in its 4th generation and its free and you can buy support for less than the cost of Xen. It installs on Windows Server or Linux. If you want to run production workloads at the best possible level of performance then look at ESX. Just be aware there will be a learning curve. I'd start with VMware server and see if it works out for you. I don't think you'll be disappointed.
Whitepaper from VMWare on differences between VMWare and Xen:
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/
My opinion (I am both a XENServer certified CCA as a VMware Certified Professional and VAC: ESX is a much more mature product, and provides for a much wider array of support, and much better Enterprise class functionality. (better support for hardware initiated storage with enterprise HA/DRS/VMotion, etc.)
Check out the attached Xen versus ESX 3.5 PDF that I created.
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by: briancassinPosted on 2008-03-11 at 05:58:56ID: 21095229
The question you ask is going to be mainly an answer based on opinion but I will also provide some links to some benchmark results
Here is some information for you for comparison many links exist at the bottom of this page to other comparisons.
http://blogs.vmware.com/vm
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/
IMHO - VMWare is a a very matured product with a lot of support. I guess my best comparison is think of VMWare as Cisco is to networking. I do not think Xen has as much support or maturity in there product. Yes they now are owned by Citrix but Citrix has had its fair share of problems. It took them years to get printing working correctly in there citrix metaframe even now it still has its isues but it is much better then it used to be. Ask anyone involved with citrix before version 4 and they'll tell you all about the printing problems. Not to say this will directly reflect there commitment to fixing problems with Xen but it's something to keep in mind.