Many people search for a comparison between the last affordable virtualization solution in the market Proxmox PVE and xcp-ng. Lawrence Systems offers a good but incomplete summary. So here are a more detailed feature comparison of these both hypervisor solutions.
Short illumination about the row "snapshot needed space efficiency (block storage)"
When using a shared block storage with PVE or xcp-ng the cluster storage format is LVM Thick. For using it with snapshot support one need an extra storage layer like vhd or qemu. In contrast to vhd the qemu layer requires the same amount of free disk space as the vdisk volume of which a snapshot is to be taken. More infos can be found at this link: https://kb.blockbridge.com/technote...m/index.html#lun-sizing-for-thick-allocations. XenServer itself goes an additional way with GSF2 + qcow2 for shared block storage. Of course, this is not so performant. It is not unlikely that xcp-ng will integrate this solution in its new storage stack as well.
Some information to xcp-ng, xostor, xo and Vates:
XCP-ng is a virtualization platform incubated within the Xen Project as XenServer fork and hosted by the Linux Foundation. Vates is the company that develop the xen orchestra (xo) an open source Web-Admin-UI for xcp-ng with additional features like VM replication, VM backup aso. xostore is a project of xcp-ng to offer HCI functionality with Linbits "Linstor" based on DRBD and is included in the xcp-ng product. Vates offer a bundle consisting of a stable release of xo (called xoa) with a Web-Admin-UI for xostor and professional support.
From my perspective:
killer feature of PVE:
killer feature of xcp-ng:
Short illumination about the row "snapshot needed space efficiency (block storage)"
When using a shared block storage with PVE or xcp-ng the cluster storage format is LVM Thick. For using it with snapshot support one need an extra storage layer like vhd or qemu. In contrast to vhd the qemu layer requires the same amount of free disk space as the vdisk volume of which a snapshot is to be taken. More infos can be found at this link: https://kb.blockbridge.com/technote...m/index.html#lun-sizing-for-thick-allocations. XenServer itself goes an additional way with GSF2 + qcow2 for shared block storage. Of course, this is not so performant. It is not unlikely that xcp-ng will integrate this solution in its new storage stack as well.
Some information to xcp-ng, xostor, xo and Vates:
XCP-ng is a virtualization platform incubated within the Xen Project as XenServer fork and hosted by the Linux Foundation. Vates is the company that develop the xen orchestra (xo) an open source Web-Admin-UI for xcp-ng with additional features like VM replication, VM backup aso. xostore is a project of xcp-ng to offer HCI functionality with Linbits "Linstor" based on DRBD and is included in the xcp-ng product. Vates offer a bundle consisting of a stable release of xo (called xoa) with a Web-Admin-UI for xostor and professional support.
From my perspective:
killer feature of PVE:
- integraded HCI with ceph
- zfs-over-iscsi storage
- integraded firewall for host and VMs
- awesome gui with most functions
killer feature of xcp-ng:
- stability
- 24/7 support
- complete load balancing
- VM backup with important functions
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