On 04/15/2011 03:29 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 7:47 AM, Vaclav Mocek<[log in to unmask]>  wrote:
>> On 04/14/2011 05:24 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>>> You need to go *straight* to VMWare. Do not stop at Xen, do not stop
>>> at KVM. Go right to commercial grade support, and install an ESX
>>> server if you can.
>> Why should the better choice be ESX than KVM for somebody who is familiar
>> with Linux?
>>
>> Seriously, I am building my first server for virtualisation and KVM works
>> out of the box /two days ;-) /.
> Becasue libvirt was designed by goats who'd been sniffing too many
> pheromones. Let's just say that they were not paying attention to Eric
> Raymond's guidelines on open source GUI's
> (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html) and leave it at
> that.
>
> Our favorite upstream vendor is usually quite good at writing gui's,
> having learned a lot of lessons over the years and having strong
> developers. libvirt is not one of their shining efforts.
>
It looks like you complain about GUI tools, which are provided with 
libvirt (it is a library). Honestly, I expected some technical things 
KVM versus ESX. I don't think, that the GUI is a major problem, it is a 
matter of personal taste. I have no problem with the default GUI 
interface and  I enjoy using Python's libvirt bindings in scripts.

> VMWare, especially its LabManager suite with which I've worked
> recently, does a much more thorough job. It's not perfect: the update
> of VMwareTools with kernel updates is hardly perfect, and its
> interactions with the NetworkManager of SL 6 and RHEL 6 are not good.
> But I'm not thrilled with NetworkManager in servers or managed
> environments, either.
Well, may be for static servers, using laptops without NetworkManager 
would be pain.
> I've heard good things about KVM performance, but didn't see it in
> RHEL/CentOS/SL 5.x. I'll be very intersted to see the results of the
> Debian testing I'm doing in the near future.
I use 6.x KVM and performance is really good. Debian? My experience is 
that almost all things being developed by Red Had, are much worse 
integrated in Debian [Lenny|Squeeze]: SELinux, Network Manager, Package 
Kit, KVM ...


Vaclav M.