Best tool for the Job?

[njfife]

I am an IT assistant (kinda an intern, it is complicated) anyway the company I work for has medium sized server room that has a lot of very old machines, many are running old versions of windows, like 98 and 95, (I think one is using 3.1). They are machines doing a specific job and have been working for years and have no need of being replaced, IE there is no need to upgrade them, they already work fine.

The problem is that they take up space and are making to room too hot. We have a bunch of blade servers that handle the file storage of the office ect... and we don't want and overheating to happen as we start to add some more servers to the room.

We are trying to figure out if we should consider a virtualization server. We are willing to spend between 2000-4000 dollars on a new blade server to replace the 10 or so servers that almost never use there CPU except for the once or twice a day when someone uses them.

Is Xen a good choice? Or is VMware a better option? If so why? we are just doing research at the moment, but a lot of the data out there seems to be targeted at companies trying to build large cloud servers, we just want to consolidate a few of our machines and make our server room more stable.

[cheesecake42]

managing vmware has been HELLLLL for me. I switched to xen close to a year ago and have never looked back. With vmware you pretty much are forced to use the gui management which is horrible. I had lots of weird problems having to restart the three services that make up vmware and half of the time they wouldnt come up right until the third or fourth try.

Xen on the other hand has been amazing. It's all console based so I can start, stop, create vm's with just a couple of short commands. Plus if you are installing linux on a xen vm, you can use the console-based install right from the command line with xen (so making install scripts is super easy).

Also, xen uses a hypervisor so the vm's can pretty much have direct access to the host's hardware.

[Rubberman]

Xen is good but kvm and virtualbox are, IMO, better. The problem with Xen is that the modifications it makes to the kernel make it so that a lot of hardware drivers won't work on the host system. The nVidia video drivers are a case in point. Anyway, Xen is great for servers where you aren't going to be running any GUI applications that require native video drivers. For workstations where mostly you are running VM's for software development, testing, applications that require a foreign OS, then VirtualBox is best. These days, I would rather run KVM in place of Xen for core server functionality.

[cheesecake42]

I've only dealt with xen on server blade's so i've never had to deal with video driver issues. I can see it being a pain having to use a custom kernel on a multi-service system though. KVM will most likely win out in the long run thanks to it's code being added to the stock kernel. However, KVM is still fairly new and not quite as robust, tried and true as xen at this point.

They all work though so it's really a matter of opinion.

[Rubberman]

I've only dealt with xen on server blade's so i've never had to deal with video driver issues. I can see it being a pain having to use a custom kernel on a multi-service system though. KVM will most likely win out in the long run thanks to it's code being added to the stock kernel. However, KVM is still fairly new and not quite as robust, tried and true as xen at this point.

They all work though so it's really a matter of opinion.

I agree with you 100%, including the matter of opinion part... I ran xen happily when I first built my current workstation 2 1/2 years ago (8 core, 8GB RAM, 2+TB disc) until I found that the proprietary drivers for my nVidia 8800GT card wouldn't install on a xen-enabled kernel. So, I switched to VirtualBox as my VM requirements are more on the development end than production server needs. So, for production servers running in a VM on a Linux host, xen is a really, really good choice. That's my opinion also.

[njfife]

This has been helpful, I have an idea of some of the issues and things to consider and look into, I will post again if I have more issues, thank you for the discussion.

[njfife]

I don't like the idea of having a bulky host operating system then running a host program like virtual box or VMWare on top of it, that seems like it will just be really slow, which may be fine for our purpose, but I like the Hypervisor system that Xen uses, and it seems that VMWare does as well. Does the hypervisor really help that much in speed? And if so is the "hypervisor" just a simple version of Linux? So do the normal Linux commands work? or is it a whole new syntax that I would need to learn? I am assuming that since is it so small of an OS that there is no GUI at all.

[cheesecake42]

Personally I think it does because it gives the vm's very direct access to hardware. I can't remember if it was this month or last month but one of those two Linux Journals had a really good article on KVM Vs Xen and there was a good bit of talk about hypervisors.

[njfife]

Personally I think it does because it gives the vm's very direct access to hardware. I can't remember if it was this month or last month but one of those two Linux Journals had a really good article on KVM Vs Xen and there was a good bit of talk about hypervisors.

do you know where I could read that journal? A link or something?

[cheesecake42]

Not online. You'd have to get it from the store or maybe from the website Linux Journal | The Original Magazine of the Linux Community