Although our virtualization requirements are minimal–we need to run only two guest servers on a single host machine–VMware would have cost an astonishing amount of money. Ultimately, we decided KVM was a better fit for our needs based on the following considerations: My colleagues and I tested KVM (running on an Ubuntu 8.04 host) and ‘barebones’ VMware ESX server over the last several weeks. Integrated into the Linux kernel, KVM provides feature-rich and highly efficient virtualization. The rapid maturation of KVM, or ‘kernel-based virtual machine’, over the course of the last couple of years constituted the first open-source challenge to VMware. As a result, proprietary virtualization products like VMware enjoyed a near-monopoly in the enterprise market until quite recently. Xen has also existed since 2003, but for a long time it only supported a limited set of guest operating systems, which did not include Windows until late 2005. True, the qemu project has been around for a while, but qemu remains too inefficient for most production environments. Until a couple years ago, the open-source community offered no real contender in the virtualization market. Below, I discuss why we chose KVM over its (mostly proprietary) alternatives. After a month of debate and experimentation, my employer has made the decision to use the open-source KVM virtualization infrastructure for migrating IT resources to a virtualized environment.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |