On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 7:46 AM, Vaclav Mocek <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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.

It's more than "taste", it's actually de-stabilizing. It's a long
rant, more suitable for our favorite upstream vendor.

>> 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.

For laptops that bounce from wired to wireless to modem use, it's
useful. Not for desktops or servers. Unfortunately, it's been welded
into Gnome dependencies. Again, this is an upstream problem, not one
that SL can fix.

>> 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 ...

I've professional reasons to use Debian right now. I'm keeping my
fingers in RH  based distributions out of support for projects I've
done for...... too darn long.