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.

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.

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.