New installation evaluating prox and xenserver 6

[bishoptf]

I am in the process of upgrading a church that I support off hours and wanting to virtualize a couple of servers that they are using. Currently looking at xenserver/xencloud 6 and proxmox. It will be several months before I move this into production so I might get to use 2.0 if stable. The main server will be a MS SBS 2011 server, anyone not familiar with it, its the swiss army knife for SMB runs exchange, domain controller, basically everything. I also have a fog projerct image server, based on centos which right now is running on KVM in a centos box and a couple of lightweight MS win7 running spiceworks and some other software. So I need something that is rock solid and was wondering if anyone is running SBS 2008 installations and if they are having any issues. I have less than 20 total users and usually less than 10 concurrent users, and some simple file shares nothing very taxing. My plan is to backup to a NAS device and from the nas backup to a disk that are rotated offsite. It appears that I would be able to achieve this with proxmox just wanting to get some more advice/opinons. I'm a linux guy and have been for years but I am trying to set this up so that it would be easy for anyone to pick up, I am trying to avoid vmware esxi and hyper-v, and only looking at proxmox and xenserver, Thanks in advance.

 

[mlanner]

+1 for Proxmox. Can't see how you could go wrong.

 

[gkovacs]

We are running several Hyper-V and Proxmox boxes. If you want to virtualize mostly Windows servers, your best bet is Hyper-V running on Windows Server 2008 R2 in terms of performance and features. Disk and network IO has been fine tuned for performance, as the paravirtualized drivers (Integration Components) are installed by default on 2008R2 guests.

- dynamic memory is a great saver of resources
- the new virtual hard drives perform really well
- snapshotting is fast and flexible
- network performance is great if you attach every virtual network to a physical card
- pass-through disk option offers bare metal disk performance for databases and Exchange (albeit at the cost of snapshotting ability, but you would need backups anyways)

Linux also runs well over Hyper-V, there is a package called Linux Integration Components that offers paravirtualized drivers since kernel 2.6.32:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=eee39325-898b-4522-9b4c-f4b5b9b64551

Proxmox is the better option if you wish to run Linux and Windows on the same hardware, and you need a lot of IO performance on Linux, in which case OpenVZ should be used. KVM provides inferior (disk, network) IO performance compared to OpenVZ, and also much higher memory footprint. So if you have many hard-working Linux guests and one or two Windows, Proxmox is probably the better choice. It's also free if that counts.

 

[bishoptf]

We are running several Hyper-V and Proxmox boxes. If you want to virtualize mostly Windows servers, your best bet is Hyper-V running on Windows Server 2008 R2 in terms of performance and features. Disk and network IO has been fine tuned for performance, as the paravirtualized drivers (Integration Components) are installed by default on 2008R2 guests.

- dynamic memory is a great saver of resources
- the new virtual hard drives perform really well
- snapshotting is fast and flexible
- network performance is great if you attach every virtual network to a physical card
- pass-through disk option offers bare metal disk performance for databases and Exchange (albeit at the cost of snapshotting ability, but you would need backups anyways)

Linux also runs well over Hyper-V, there is a package called Linux Integration Components that offers paravirtualized drivers since kernel 2.6.32:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=eee39325-898b-4522-9b4c-f4b5b9b64551

Proxmox is the better option if you wish to run Linux and Windows on the same hardware, and you need a lot of IO performance on Linux, in which case OpenVZ should be used. KVM provides inferior (disk, network) IO performance compared to OpenVZ, and also much higher memory footprint. So if you have many hard-working Linux guests and one or two Windows, Proxmox is probably the better choice. It's also free if that counts.

Thanks for the information, the servers I will have is a mix, SBS 2011, win7 spiceworks, antivirus server, Linux Fog Image server, linux Proxmox Email Gateway. None of them will be heavy IO per se, I have the fog server right now running on a Centos/KVM box and it works well enough. I will probably kick the tires of promox 2.0, xenserver 6 and maybe vmware esxi 5 but vmware gives me the least options and prox I think gives me the most options. I actually could go with hyper-v since we get a huge non-profit discount, but i'd rather do almost anything rather than go with another MS product....