I am really happy with proxmox

M

macday

Member
Mar 10, 2010
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Stuttgart / Germany
Hi girls, and guys,

I just want to say that I am really happy with proxmox. I migrated nearly 100 vm's from VMware to proxmox (kvm) and it's simply working.

A big thanx to all the envolved developers.

good night

MacDay:D
 
100? Wow. Hope that with this big saving you have some money to donate them! :)
Just for curiosity, were them mostly Windows ones? Are you using Proxmox kernel 2.6.32 or which one? What HD format are you using? (converted to raw or the vmdk?) VirtIO drivers? What was the most difficult part? What do you miss from VMWare and what you find Proxmox does better?
 
Hi macday !!!

I'm newbie in proxmox, I'm very interesting if you could answer to mmenaz question. Please shared your knowledge and experience with community.

Thank in advanced.
 
Sure I will donate cause it's worth some or a little more money :) To answer your questions: most of the migrated vm's were Windows 2003 and Windows XP, about 30% linux servers (Ubuntu, openSUSE, CentOS) and 10% FreeBSD Firewalls. I am using Proxmox kernel 2.6.32-2. HD format is always raw and the half of the hosts are lvm-raw. On the M$-Side I use VirtIO for Storage and Network. On the *nix side I use VirtIO on Ubuntu and openSUSE. CentOS doesn't work well though it has an old 2.6.18 kernel. As Host-Hardware I use most Dell Servers because they have an OMSA (Server-Management) -Debian repository. The most difficult part was to find a way (thanks to the community) to migrate the vm's from VMware Server 2.0 and ESX with the smallest possible effort. Another part was to know/learn the issues in migrating M$-based products (Activation, Driver-issues, Networking). There are only few things I miss from VMWare: HA (but it's hopefully released soon), Monitoring History (perhaps Nagion Plugin), OpenVSwitch, Partition-Assistant for the Installer. I think Proxmox is the better all-in-one solution cause of the simple to use management and backup-features. (vmware supplies the data recovery option only with the enterprise license)



mmenaz said:
100? Wow. Hope that with this big saving you have some money to donate them! :)
Just for curiosity, were them mostly Windows ones? Are you using Proxmox kernel 2.6.32 or which one? What HD format are you using? (converted to raw or the vmdk?) VirtIO drivers? What was the most difficult part? What do you miss from VMWare and what you find Proxmox does better?
Click to expand...
 
Impressive ;-), are you running any M$-SQL servers? how well are they performing compared to vmware? Which version of the virtio drivers to you use for Windows?
 
No I am not running any plane M$-SQL servers just Exchange, Small Business (there is an SQL-Express running), Blackberry Enterprise, ... I use the standard virtio drivers for my Windows XP 2003 machines and the signed drivers from the kvm-forum for my 2008 and R2 machines. But about performace i can say on the same machine i had vmware server running proxmox performs 4-8 times faster (disk io and net io). Sure there are still some issues with more than 1 cpu per vm but I did not test it in detail. One 2008 machine has 2 Cores assigned and till now its working well.
 
Starting to get me curious ;-). We are about to choose either vmware or proxmox. I'm afraid the Windows performance and stability will be the deciding factor. It seems the 2.6.32 kernel and virtio really boost kvm performance along with lvm. What kind of storage are you using?
 
I am using different storage types. Local Raid 10 and shared SAN Raid 10 storage for my cluster. But before you decide test proxmox an the hardware and do some stresstests on the vm's.
 
macday said:
Hi girls, and guys,

I just want to say that I am really happy with proxmox. I migrated nearly 100 vm's from VMware to proxmox (kvm) and it's simply working.

MacDay:D
Click to expand...

May I ask why you left Vmware behind? I am trying to decide between vmware and proxmox. And also wondering how did you make the migration? Which way and tools did you use?

Thanks in advance.
 
I left vmware because of the missing linux-management-tools. Vmware is a good product but you always need a windows machine to manage it. As for me 3 years ago I switched to linux desktop. So I first used Vmware-Server 2.0 which was good at the begining but vmware did not care about it. Perhaps if vmware released a version 3.0 of vmware-server I'd probably stayed. But then I researched for alternatives (as I always did on my linux desktop). I knew proxmox before but it really got me intressted since version 1.5. Another reason I switched was, a vm does not "see" it is virtualized. Some applications (Exchange BPA, ...) check if vmware-tools are installed and report it as a yellow risk.

I did the migration just with the tools from the proxmox wiki and some tunings on the dd-command. The next days I am planing to migrate from a vmware 3.5 cluster because the performance of a vm lying on a lvm is simply great.

cheers
 
I personally switched from VMWare due to the lack of Mac based management tools. Web-based is where it's at.
 
How do you manage your vm backups? Are you using vzdump? Where are you storing your backups? What switches are you using for vzdump command? How long does it take for you to take backups of all your VM?
 
kumarullal said:
How do you manage your vm backups? Are you using vzdump? Where are you storing your backups? What switches are you using for vzdump command? How long does it take for you to take backups of all your VM?
Click to expand...

I a using vzdump without compression to a linux-nfs-share mounted with fusecompress so the backup compression is not pulling down my cpu performance on my proxmox host. the sitches are only bwlimit: 1024000.
 
Thanks for your quick reply macday,
Since it is an NFS share, it must be a basic ext2/3 file system without LVM, correct? If that is the case, the switch --snapshot will not work. So are you doing the vzdump using --suspend? If so how long does the VM get out of commission?
Typically how long does it take for you to backup a VM with a large disk.
Are you firing multiple vzdump jobs?
One last question:
Could be kindly let us know how do you mount the linux-nfs-share with fusecompress option?
Thanks in advance.
 
kumarullal said:
Thanks for your quick reply macday,
Since it is an NFS share, it must be a basic ext2/3 file system without LVM, correct? If that is the case, the switch --snapshot will not work. So are you doing the vzdump using --suspend? If so how long does the VM get out of commission?
Typically how long does it take for you to backup a VM with a large disk.
Are you firing multiple vzdump jobs?
One last question:
Could be kindly let us know how do you mount the linux-nfs-share with fusecompress option?
Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

No I use LVM as primary storage but the --snapshot option should also work with ext3-storage if you have enough free space on the default lvm-group (with the bare-metal installer there is not enough free space on the lvm-group - you have to resize the "/var/lib/vz"-partition). In my environment I could NOT use the --suspend option cause the vm´s should not be down or halted. The fusecompress is used on the backup-destination server. It is an Ubuntu 10.04 server (apt-get install fusecompress - for an howto look here http://tinyurl.com/mvbvvf). Hope this helps :)
 
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