Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : OpenVZ vs Xen vs VMware

[NexDog]

All these are free but which is best. What are the pros and cons? Have been using Virtuozzo and I love it but thinking about offering cheaper solutions with GPL software.

[j2m2]

you're not allowed to use vmware for commerical purposes (i.e using it to sell VPS)

Xen supports windows. Last I checked OpenVZ does not.

All depends are what you're going to offer the end user.

[DeltaAnime]

As far as I can tell ESXi doesn't allow you to offer it in a hosting enviroment.

I personally like openVZ, though XEN is pretty nice. With that being said, both are well supported by HyperVM, which is what i'm assuming you'll use for a control panel for it. There are some opensource control panels out there but they're more for the admin users, not end user to access. I'm sure you could use one of them as a stepping stone to build something nice.

As I mentioned in another topic I have been checking out 'FluidVM', a very well priced control panel that supports openvz very nicely and XEN quite well (a lot more features for openvz, of course).

Thanks,

~Francisco

[Nex7]

Virtuozzo is not Xen or VMware, first of all. Now if you're planning to resell, a lot of people do choose Virtuozzo so they can oversell the heck out of a box. If you want to go down that road, your only option is Virtuozzo - Xen and VMware won't let you oversell nearly as much.

If you don't mind keeping yourself to sane limits, your only option is Xen, as VMware won't let you resell VPS's unless you're paying them, and the price is not cheap.

[Adam-AEC]

OpenVZ - Easy to setup, supports overselling, deployment of tarball images is easy, configuring UBC correctly can sometimes be a pain

Xen - Getting better to setup (yum groupinstall Virtualization), but deployment isn't for the weak at heart. Unattended installs will require bootstrapping or kickstarts, unless you want to walk through every install via the console. No overselling, but using physical disk images is nice (you'd want to use LVM instead of loopback if you go this route). All kernels are isolated, so bsd/solaris is probably an option if you want to run those too (and maybe Windows)

[davidshq]

Virtuozzo uses a form of paravirtualization, its not truly virtualizing in the sense that VMWare/Xen virtualizes. This results in the inability to have users patch their own servers, etc.
Dave.

[gplhost]

Originally Posted by DeltaAnime

I personally like openVZ, though XEN is pretty nice. With that being said, both are well supported by HyperVM, which is what i'm assuming you'll use for a control panel for it. There are some opensource control panels out there but they're more for the admin users, not end user to access.

Wrong:

http://packages.debian.org/lenny/dtc-xen
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/dtc

Thomas

[fkam17]

I find OpenVZ gives me better performance than VMware and Xen.

[Spirit]

Originally Posted by NexDog

but thinking about offering cheaper solutions with GPL software.

From rare customer point of view:

"Everyone" use openVZ and it's hard to find decent Xen provider - which is more and more appreciated among more advanced customers, which want to do things (like recompile kernel, add modules, set ipv6..) on their own.
Even if you browse through those pages (VPS Hosting Offers -> look thread titles) you might notice that offering Xen become part of selling strategy.

[johnbrown362003]

Originally Posted by NexDog

thinking about offering cheaper solutions with GPL software.

OpenVZ is the way to go, plus they have the option to buy annual support for OpenVZ if you need it. Simple and easy to get going without having to learn too much of new stuff. And if you have Virtuozzo experience then it should be a snap.

There are various forms of virtualization : OpenVZ/VServer/Solaris Containers for OS container Virtualization, Xen for paravirtualization and VMWare/Microsoft Hyper-V for bare metal type and of course KVM.

OS container virtualization with OpenVZ will probably give you the best bang for your buck and get to the lowest price point. I've implemented OpenVZ for a number of smaller clients (web development shops) and they love it.

Xen from Xensource has a learning curve though the Express Xen from
Citrix has a nice GUI but will not get you to your price point.

Who knows how the future will unfold with all the different commercial offerings and Microsoft giving away Hyper-V for almost nothing.

[ragubhat]

cheaper solutions with GPL software

OpenVZ kernel on a Debian amd64 HN, preferably Intel Quad Core Xeons x 2.

CentOS 5.2 x86_64 templates with cPanel/DA over them for VPSes.

Maybe in the near future Virtuozzo would give us more free/GNU tools
like vzstat, vzcfgscale etc. Hats off to Parallels/SWSoft.

[DigitalDeviation]

Xen. If you need commercial support, you can buy the Enterprise version from Citrix (and get some cool tools) for about $3000.

As was said, you can't oversell with Xen very easily. This has to due with the way Xen provides access to thehardware underneath. You allocate actual memory, for instance, rather than shared memory (VMware). They are supposed to be adding an option to overcommit memory in the coming releases.

You can't sell VPS solutions with the free version of VMware. Not to mention the performance isn't as good.