Hullo all I'm going to be ordering a dedicated server quite soon, and I plan to carve it up into a few different VPS'es; the box itself is a quad-core i5 (2.66GHz) with 16GB RAM and 2TB of disk space, so I've got a fair bit of resource to throw around. I'm fine with looking after a remote Linux server over SSH (who needs any of that graphical nonsense? ) but I'm totally new to the virtualisation administration game. No matter what distro/hypervisor I choose I'm going to have to do some reading, but I have a choice between the following hypervisors and I have no idea of the practical difference between them: VMware ESXi 4.1 Citrix XenServer 5.6 or 6.0 Proxmox (based on x64 Debian 5.0 "Lenny") SolusVM (CentOS 6 x64) Parallels Virtuozzo Containers (CentOS 5 x64) As for the individual VMs, they'll be used for a LAMP webserver (with probably little traffic), a Minecraft Bukkit server (which needs only 1-2GB RAM at most) and a Minecraft Tekkit server (which needs the bulk of the processing power). The LAMP server probably won't need much resource, I can likely get away with 1GB RAM and a couple of gigs of disk space. The Bukkit server will probably need about 2GB RAM and not much more than a couple of gigs of disk space. But the Tekkit server will need as much as it can get... By far the most intensive processes will be the Minecraft servers; Bukkit doesn't thrash the CPU as much, but it does have a lot of disk throughput. Tekkit however has a high disk throughput, high RAM usage and tends to thrash the CPU a lot... This box has rotating disks rather than SSDs, so I'll probably boost the disk throughput for the Tekkit servers by using a RAM disk. Anyone have any recommendations for which hypervisor to use? My first thought was either ESXi or XenServer - whichever is easier to configure/maintain - but if there's anything better suited to what I need, then I'll be happy to hear it.
I used ESXi, but i wonder why do you prefer 4.1, as 5.0 is out for long time : http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html With ESXi, all you need to think about is pretty much if your NIC and SATA/RAID controllers are supported or not. It also has a nice interface for remote configuration (VMware vSphere Client), so you are pretty much at GUI wizard level interface for most parts (you can of course SSH on the hypervisor too and edit the VMX files if needed).
I noticed the GUI looks very easy to use... However the hosting company don't have ESXi 5.0 as an option, only 4.1 .
AFAIK 4.1 has same console, you can download it when you get your ESXi host from the website which runs automatically with the ESXi instance. If they hosting does the installation and the can guarantee HW compatibility, then it doesn't matter for you if you got 4.1 or 5.0. As ESXi 4.1/5.0 are free until you need more than 1 CPU and/or more than 32GB RAM, you can easily test it out even at home.
ESX, IMO. I've just finished migrating our disaster recovery stuff from Hyper V to ESX, and the ESX side was much, much better than the Hyper V side. My experience with Parallels has been limited, because every time I've used it it's caused me more pain and suffering than I care to remember. The last time was on a VPS.
No, there isn't bigkingfun. OP has a fixed list of 5 options from which he can choose from. He is asking which one of those 5.
I thought "oh well maybe he has not heard of openstack, better give him a link". Proxmox is Debian 6.0 based since 2.0
