[nycbug-talk] VPS solutions?

[User Pete]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 08:53:30AM +0200, Andy Kosela wrote:
> pete at nomadlogic.org (User Pete) wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 09:24:58AM -0400, Matt Juszczak wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > > 
> > > I need to setup a few production VPS servers on a quad core beefy box.
> > > 
> > > Seems like some options we have are OpenVZ, HyperVM, and Virtuozzo.  This 
> > > will be my first venture into the virtualization world, and I'm wondering 
> > > which option is better cost-wise (the latter isn't free), and FreeBSD-wise 
> > > (I'd like to run at least one or two FreeBSD instances).
> > > 
> >
> >
> > I'd say that Xen may be your best bet atm.  i know this is what
> > rootbsd.net is using for their VPS offerings and it seems to work quite
> > well.  a close second for bsd systems would be sun's virtual-box imho.
> >
> > virtual box will allow you to run freebsd as the hypervisor as well as a
> > "guest".  for xen i've heard good things about using netbsd as the
> > hypervisor.
> 
> If you think about serious virtualization I would not consider
> virtualbox as an option.  It is good for "home" development as this
> doesn't really compare to real VZ solutions like VMWare ESXi or Citrix
> XenServer, as those are bare metal hypervisors.  If you wanna go with
> that, I would choose VMWare as they got full support for FreeBSD as
> guest.

hrm - i guess i can see what you mean in regards of commercial support
but one feature i that i feel has always been a problem for vmwware (and
to a lesser extent xenserver) is the api in which i can program against
it with.  i have built a fair amount of production systems using both
xen and kvm with heavy leveraging lib-virt (sorry, ot since this run on
linux systems).  from what i understand about the virtualbox road map i
hope it is going to have a friendly api as well.

this is not to say that vmware does not have an api
(obviously it does, as well as a cli) - but i never felt comfortable
programming in it.  this does not even touch the fact that you need to
run windows for live migration of vm's (this may have changed but was
definatly a show stopper for any prod systems i needed to support)
along with other advanced management tasks.
> 
> On the other note though, why not use FreeBSD's native jail(8).  This is
> a very mature and advanced virtualization technology especially now with
> full virtual network stack implemented.
> 

+1 there!

-p