Hi,
We were looking for a virtualization solution for your new IBM blades and we evaluated Oracle VM and ProxMox. In order to have results we had to use the very latest Oracle VM software, and the beta version of ProxMox in order to have the shared storage capabilities. Here is a short (and certainly incomplete) comparaison of the 2 products. First of all, the 2 products performs really well, and the performances are very good. The technologies are completely different ( XEN vs KVM+OpenVZ) and similar on both products. (All my tests were on installation of Windows 2008 server).
Proxmox Pros :
- Very easy to install.
- OpenVZ capabilities with templates.
- Very fast VM creation both with qcow2 and raw storage.
- Easy to add a node in the cluster.
- Does not need any additional host to manage the cluster.
- Excellent vnc applet integration, even if the keyboard mapping is always a pain.
Proxmox Cons :
- No user & group management to give access to certain VM to some departments or people.
- No support for FC (while it shouldn't be difficult to setup from command line)
- Missing a small script name referenced on the network config to help configure the network from command line. This is not very usefull to make network config change through the network interface... IE to setup vlans + bridges + bonding.
- Should default to the best network interface type and disk type based on the OS selected when creating a VM. This should even be hidden from the VM creation, but with the possibility to change it. The basic user doesn't know which one is better, he just needs the network and disk to work.
- Missing a search tool to quickly find the VM you're looking for.
- Cannot clone a VM.
Oracle VM Pros :
- User/Group support.
- Management of multiple pools
- Search
Oracle VM Cons :
- Cannot change the group for a VM without modifiing directly into the OVMM DB.
- Slow interface with more than 50 VMs.
- No VNC applet, but it exists a Firefox plugin non standard, and hard to find.
- Keyboard mappings are wrong.
- Every reboot cause the VNC session to disconnect. This can be problematic if you have 1 second after reboot to press a key.
- You need a separated Virtual Machine Manger (OVMM) server, you can run it on the VM host, but through manual commands only, and this is not documented/supported.
- If you need HA on your Virtual Machine Manager, you need to change the DB from XE to a non free one, and pay for all instances.
We finally went to Oracle VM, mainly because it's access control on VMs (users/groups), the search features, and the ability to manage multiple pools from a central point.
The install time of Windows 2008 Server default was less than 13 minutes on both systems, that is really good. As I experienced a crash with 2008 on 2 cores, so I limited to 1 core per VM (2.93GHz) with 2GB Ram. I didn't checked in detail the network performances, but with PV drivers, this should be very good also. The tests were made on Netapp 2020 via NFS for Proxmox, and IBM DS4000 via FC + OCFS for Oracle VM.
We were looking for a virtualization solution for your new IBM blades and we evaluated Oracle VM and ProxMox. In order to have results we had to use the very latest Oracle VM software, and the beta version of ProxMox in order to have the shared storage capabilities. Here is a short (and certainly incomplete) comparaison of the 2 products. First of all, the 2 products performs really well, and the performances are very good. The technologies are completely different ( XEN vs KVM+OpenVZ) and similar on both products. (All my tests were on installation of Windows 2008 server).
Proxmox Pros :
- Very easy to install.
- OpenVZ capabilities with templates.
- Very fast VM creation both with qcow2 and raw storage.
- Easy to add a node in the cluster.
- Does not need any additional host to manage the cluster.
- Excellent vnc applet integration, even if the keyboard mapping is always a pain.
Proxmox Cons :
- No user & group management to give access to certain VM to some departments or people.
- No support for FC (while it shouldn't be difficult to setup from command line)
- Missing a small script name referenced on the network config to help configure the network from command line. This is not very usefull to make network config change through the network interface... IE to setup vlans + bridges + bonding.
- Should default to the best network interface type and disk type based on the OS selected when creating a VM. This should even be hidden from the VM creation, but with the possibility to change it. The basic user doesn't know which one is better, he just needs the network and disk to work.
- Missing a search tool to quickly find the VM you're looking for.
- Cannot clone a VM.
Oracle VM Pros :
- User/Group support.
- Management of multiple pools
- Search
Oracle VM Cons :
- Cannot change the group for a VM without modifiing directly into the OVMM DB.
- Slow interface with more than 50 VMs.
- No VNC applet, but it exists a Firefox plugin non standard, and hard to find.
- Keyboard mappings are wrong.
- Every reboot cause the VNC session to disconnect. This can be problematic if you have 1 second after reboot to press a key.
- You need a separated Virtual Machine Manger (OVMM) server, you can run it on the VM host, but through manual commands only, and this is not documented/supported.
- If you need HA on your Virtual Machine Manager, you need to change the DB from XE to a non free one, and pay for all instances.
We finally went to Oracle VM, mainly because it's access control on VMs (users/groups), the search features, and the ability to manage multiple pools from a central point.
The install time of Windows 2008 Server default was less than 13 minutes on both systems, that is really good. As I experienced a crash with 2008 on 2 cores, so I limited to 1 core per VM (2.93GHz) with 2GB Ram. I didn't checked in detail the network performances, but with PV drivers, this should be very good also. The tests were made on Netapp 2020 via NFS for Proxmox, and IBM DS4000 via FC + OCFS for Oracle VM.
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