Question

xenserver 5.0 or VMware Sphere 4 ?

Asked by: achiavegato

I have to implement a virtualization server with 2 Fujitsu Siemens RX300 (bi processor) and a NAS iSCSI. The project is for an Internet Service Provider that manages approximately 1.000 web domains. I do not know whether to use VMWare Sphere 4 or Xen Server 5.0. The acquisition hardware that is compatible for both software. VMware has established a long time but I understood that Xen Server in version 5.0 is a good product. which to choose?. Thank you

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Asked On
2009-06-05 at 16:07:03ID24468522
Tags

VMware

,

VSphere

,

Xen Server

,

Virtualization

Topics

XenServer

,

VMware

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4
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Answers

 

by: KeremEPosted on 2009-06-05 at 16:16:27ID: 24560767

In fact it all depends on your support expectations. If you think that it will be safer for you to secure a support contract then VMWare is the way to go. Add to that  their migration and support tools are enterprise grade.

If you're content with supporting the platform all by yourself or you believe that you can handle them using the forums then you should definitely go for XenServer.

As you've told in your initial post Xen has quite and establishment and won't cause you so much problems. Apart from that Xen 5 has several tools and virtualizer tool which is very strong. Also Xen is very strong at Type 1 virtualization (paravirtualization) and it is very easy to get Virtual Machines with near hardware machine performance with only a little overhead and moving a virtual machine to a different  physical system.

 

by: paulsolovPosted on 2009-06-05 at 17:26:00ID: 24560981

It all depends on how well you know the products.  

XenServer has a lower up front cost and provides some features for free that VMWare charges for.  The downside is that Xen is about 4 years behind VMWare in development and is not as stable as VMWare vSphere.

The other issue is support, as VMWare vendors are numerous but you it is much tougher to find a vendor that will support XenServer.  In general VMWare is more stable and has many software vendors that support it as well as the stability for an enterprise environment.

If you will have a cluster of hosts and a SAN behind it than vSphere gives you more features such as FT (Fault Tolerance) where you can have VMWare do VM failover realtime as well a more robust feature set in general.  With my experience XenServer is ok for small SMB environments but if you have SLAs that you have to adhere to than VMWare VI/vSphere is you best bet


 

by: larstrPosted on 2009-06-05 at 17:26:42ID: 24560983

It also depends on what type of storage you have. If you want snapshot functionality on XenServer you will only get that if you have NetApp or EqualLogic or wait for XenServer 5.5.

XenServer also doesn't have a too good load balancing functionalty yet (only initial VM placement).

For Windows guests that need a very high uptime you might consider using the third party product Marathon EverRun.

VMware would still be the safest choice as it is the most mature product. Be however aware that not all functionality is available on ESX4 (vSphere) yet (such as SRM & View). It still has better OS support, memory handling, management tools, Fault Tolerance (quite) similar to Marathon EverRun (but also possible to use on Linux guests), better vendor support, etc.

Lars

 

by: BarklessdogPosted on 2009-07-29 at 18:24:45ID: 24976043

Take a quick look at Parallels Virtuozzo Containers. This solution is well suited for this type of deployment.

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