[mdlug] Virtual Server Time

[Carl T. Miller]

Michael ORourke wrote:
>
> Rather than discount Virtual Box altogether, I would keep that as an
> option.  So what if it is slower than other hypervisors?  Best to look at
> the big picture and scope of the project.  Sometimes building something
> simple that can easily be supported out-weighs a complex high performance
> solution that is difficult to manage.  Now if you were building an
> enterprise-level virtual environment for hundreds of virtual servers, I
> would recommend something other than Virtual Box.  But 3 VMs can be
> managed fairly easily with Virtual Box.

My experience has been that KVM is far easier to manage than
VirtualBox.  With either product setting up a new vm is fairly
easy, whether you like the gui or the command line better.
Where KVM shines is with upgrades.

For an upgrade of the hypervisor with VirtualBox, I needed to
shutdown all guests, install the upgrade, compile the upgrade,
restart services on the host, restart each guest, and then on
each guest (even non-Linux) I needed to install the new drivers
and then install a separate package that allowed remote access
to the console.

For an upgrade of the hypervisor with KVM, I just ran "yum upgrade"
on the host and on each of the Linux vms.  Windows vms didn't
need anything extra.

For an upgrade of the kernel with VirtualBox, I needed to
shutdown all guests, compile the VirtualBox executables,
restart services on the host, restart each guest, and then on
each guest (even non-Linux) I needed to install the new drivers.

For an upgrade of the kernel with KVM, I just ran "yum upgrade"
and rebooted on the host and on each of the Linux vms.  Windows
vms didn't need anything extra.

Just for this reason I'd go with KVM even if it weren't the
hypervisor with the least overhead.

c