Best hypervisor in gentoo

fmsilva · n00b Joined: 30 Dec 2008 Posts: 16

Hello all !

My hardware :

Supermicro x8dtl - 24Gb ram with 2 intel xeon (24 cores total)/ 1tb hdd, 4tb hdd, 4tb hdd

My goals :

- Create VM for testing, oracle tecnologies (mysql, dataguard, golden gate, rac
- Create VM for testing Windows (AD, sqlserver, WSUS)
- Create VM for testing network solutions (reverse proxy, ldap)

I already have gentoo installed in usb pen 32gb.

I need some help to choose one hypervisor and tools and network management.

thanks
Fernando

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2018 11:44 am Post subject:

fmsilva,

KVM is good but I've never used it for Windows guests. Its what I mostly use.
For quick and dirty, point and click, VirtualBox just works out of the box.

To get the best performance, you need to use the virtio drivers but that requires that the guest support them too.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3135

Windows runs quite well inside KVM, though it does not support virtio by default (you need to install additional drivers all by yourself).
I didn't really like VB, and since KVM comes with kernel and gets the job done, I had no need to look any further.
Another famous option, vmWare clearly aims to be the all-in-one solution for datacentres. Has some nice features and clickable web-ui which tended to lag a lot and I'd often click something right next to the thing I expected. Not sure how much of it came from vmware and how much from fencing techniques employed to protect said datacenters. When I was more into it, you could get a free ESXi licence; vSphere required for clustering was expensive though. Past tense, because I haven't followed them for a few years.

Never bothered to actually compare performance, just pick whatever is the easiest to deploy or manage in your case. E.g. networking may or may not be an issue.

fmsilva · n00b Joined: 30 Dec 2008 Posts: 16

Thank you NeddySeagoon and szatox for you feedback!

i have already compile kvm in kernel

next step learning KVM, mount LVM and start to migrate, hyper-v, vmware and virtualbox VM's

abduct · Apprentice Joined: 19 Mar 2015 Posts: 215

I enjoy using QEMU on my laptops/servers. It provides both CLI and GUI configuration methods and uses KVM by default if the kernel supports it.

QEMU also has support for native VNC when used in a headless environment so you can still manage your servers if a GUI environment is required (IE Windows without SSH). It also supports GTK front end in case you want to directly access the VM from the host (if it has X11 and GTK installed). It also allows for direct writing to partitions on a disk to by pass the overhead of container files like COW2 and the like, in case you need a little more IO performance. It's a bit more tricky to migrate VM's though as you have to backup and import partitions rather than just transfer a file.

For a total solution I use libvirt (https://libvirt.org/) it is more or less a wrapper around all the low end configuration QEMU and other VM containers which simplifies hosting of virtual machines. It also provides provisions for monitoring and reconfiguration of live VMs. Ever had a need to give a specific VM more or less cores, or increase it's ram? Libvirt exposes those features to you in a simple manor. Ever had to rapidly spin up similar VM's at the same time (IE same ram, same cpu resources, same hdd resources)? Libvirt exposes that to you via configuration files.