Citrix or vmware for 10+ C6100 machines?

[legen]

Hi!

I'm doing some research on what virtualization software to use for a larger hobby project. Our goal is to have 10+ C6100 machines running a hypervisor and quite many VMs.

Until now we have exclusively used esxi (both free and trials, including vCenter). However, since xenserver (including xenCenter) now changed their licensing model and seems to include an awesome set of things for free we are thinking about choosing citrix in favor of vmware.

These are my (hopefully) simple questions,

1. My primary concern is if xenserver+xenCenter truly is free? According to this page it now has a per socket/cpu licensing. Could you clarify if its free or not for our intended usage?
2. This is probably really hard to answer, but what pros and cons does the xenserver+xenCenter alternative have vs esxi+vCenter. Any recommendations on the two routes for our project (which does have a tight budget) would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Nirvash]

Xenserver and Xencenter are free, you can though, get a licenses for support and automatic patches/updates.

What Citrix is providing is the supported commercial distribution of the XenServer for customers that are running XenServer in an environment that warrants the “insurance policy†of a supported, commercial product. You can think of this like Red Hat Enterprise Linux versus Linux. At the feature and functionality level, the only difference will be that free Citrix XenServer users will not be able to use XenCenter for automated installation of security fixes, updates and maintenance releases. Free Citrix XenServer does include XenCenter for server management, but not patch management. By purchasing Citrix XenServer you get:

Citrix Premier 24×7 worldwide support
Commercially packaged and certified product
Simplified patching and updating via XenCenter
Indemnification and license protection

I can't comment on Xen vs ESXI, since I have only really played with Xen.

 

[PigLover]

Downsides of Xen:

• IO penalty is much higher than it is with ESXi/KVM. If your application is disk or lan intensive the the IO model can become a bottleneck. Even though Xen has paravirtualized drivers, its IO model always requires an extra loop through user space. It will continue to suffer this penalty until they finish their "segmented Dom0" redesign, which could still be 1-2 years from released and stable.
• Limited/no support for legacy OS guests. Poor/no support for Solaris, BSD, etc.

But - on the upside - if your guests are current/near current Windows (7/8/2008/2012) or current/near current Linux then Xenserver works really well. Xen has better support for desktop visualization/thin client/VDI than ESXi or KVM.

Xenserver is also priced a bit better than VMware these days

 

[legen]

Xenserver and Xencenter are free, you can though, get a licenses for support and automatic patches/updates.


I can't comment on Xen vs ESXI, since I have only really played with Xen.

Great! How do you patch without a license, is it troublesome (like free esxi where you need to go via cmd->esxCli)?

Also how good is the built in backup in xenCenter (compared to i.e veeam)? Can it also do replication? It would be nice if veeam supported xenserver but sadly thats not the case.

Downsides of Xen:

• IO penalty is much higher than it is with ESXi/KVM. If your application is disk or lan intensive the the IO model can become a bottleneck. Even though Xen has paravirtualized drivers, its IO model always requires an extra loop through user space. It will continue to suffer this penalty until they finish their "segmented Dom0" redesign, which could still be 1-2 years from released and stable.
• Limited/no support for legacy OS guests. Poor/no support for Solaris, BSD, etc.

But - on the upside - if your guests are current/near current Windows (7/8/2008/2012) or current/near current Linux then Xenserver works really well. Xen has better support for desktop visualization/thin client/VDI than ESXi or KVM.

Xenserver is also priced a bit better than VMware these days

We used a tips by, i think, dba here on sth and are currently using 2x SSD drives + 1 HDD (for replication) in each C6100 node. Thus we have good IOPS so i think we can take the xen penalty (ofc we may move databases to another solution).

Im supprised that the BSD support is poor, have to analyze if this will affect us.

Great answers guys, thank you!

 

[mrkrad]

I'd do hyper-v 2012 R2 before xen.

Xen s strong for VDI but you still have to pay for the good vdi stuff like virtualized vga.

Nobody has ever been fired for choosing ESXi.

 

[xena]

well solution is really simple here. Do you have money for your "hobby " project to support buying esxi+vcenter?... And why would you spend a fortune for vmware licenses when you can have free! xenserver?
I manage many "virtual" platforms ...vmware, xen, hyper-v, kvm, bsd jails and cross few others and xenserver is still one the best...and now citrix gave it to community for free. Or...another option could be a PROXMOX platform. Its amazing how can you get so mature product for free, I liked this project so much that I choose proxmox to be my home virtual solution. In the long term...we will be switching from vmware and hyper-v to xen and kvm(proxmox) platforms because there isnt justification for paying fortune to vmware and ms for their solutions when you can get same for much less(paid subscription) or free. I know...in some cases is important to have big name behind your back so you can blame them if sh.t happens or if customer insist on specific product but mostly customers dont give cr.p whats running their IT, all they want its just good price.

 

[tubs-ffm]

And why would you spend a fortune for vmware licenses when you can have free! xenserver?

This I do not understand. ESXi or vsphere hypervisor how it is called today also is for free. Ok there is the limitation that since ESXi 5.5 you have to stay with the "old" hardware version vmx-09 to be able to use the vsphere client. To manage vsphere hardware version vmx-10 you need to get vsphere Server that actually is not for free.

Did I missed any Point?

 

[xena]

This I do not understand. ESXi or vsphere hypervisor how it is called today also is for free. Ok there is the limitation that since ESXi 5.5 you have to stay with the "old" hardware version vmx-09 to be able to use the vsphere client. To manage vsphere hardware version vmx-10 you need to get vsphere Server that actually is not for free.

Did I missed any Point?

Hm I read 10 hw nodes, so I automatically thought that there will by some cluster setup maybe HA. But if its about 10x single nodes without one-central management console(vcenter should work in trial for 60 days with free Esxi nodes) vmware can be used....but why use Ford when you can have Audi or Bmw for nearly free?

 

[legen]

I'd do hyper-v 2012 R2 before xen.

Xen s strong for VDI but you still have to pay for the good vdi stuff like virtualized vga.

Nobody has ever been fired for choosing ESXi.

This is not done for any company, its just me and a friend, thus esxi is a little to overpriced for us

What do you mean about virtualized VGA? Our intention is to run headless linux servers (debian/ubuntu) and some windows 2008 machines (we have got a couple of licenses from another company switching to newer windows server versions).

well solution is really simple here. Do you have money for your "hobby " project to support buying esxi+vcenter?... And why would you spend a fortune for vmware licenses when you can have free! xenserver?
I manage many "virtual" platforms ...vmware, xen, hyper-v, kvm, bsd jails and cross few others and xenserver is still one the best...and now citrix gave it to community for free. Or...another option could be a PROXMOX platform. Its amazing how can you get so mature product for free, I liked this project so much that I choose proxmox to be my home virtual solution. In the long term...we will be switching from vmware and hyper-v to xen and kvm(proxmox) platforms because there isnt justification for paying fortune to vmware and ms for their solutions when you can get same for much less(paid subscription) or free. I know...in some cases is important to have big name behind your back so you can blame them if sh.t happens or if customer insist on specific product but mostly customers dont give cr.p whats running their IT, all they want its just good price.

We looked into proxmox but it did not have all the features we wanted at the time. I agree with what you say and i think xenserver is the way to go for us.

Hm I read 10 hw nodes, so I automatically thought that there will by some cluster setup maybe HA. But if its about 10x single nodes without one-central management console(vcenter should work in trial for 60 days with free Esxi nodes) vmware can be used....but why use Ford when you can have Audi or Bmw for nearly free?

Yeah we have aim for 10+ HW nodes with HA, backup and replication, thus we need vCenter (or equivalent). Now when we get xenserver+xencenter for free it seems superior to esxi+vCenter

 

[Mike]

Which features are you missing in Proxmox?

 

[legen]

Which features are you missing in Proxmox?

I feel that i might not be fully qualified to give a correct answer to this since i only briefly tested proxmox and xenserver.

But the overall feeling is that proxmox has the functionality, its just not that user friendly to utilize. Some quick requirements of ours,

• central management (both xen and prox has this, different approaches tho).
• LACP support (seems hacky in the proxmox case)
• PCI-passthrough or RDM (this might be a obsolete requirement, both can do this the shell hacky way)
• LDAP support with memberOf overlay support (sadly none has this atm)
• Automatic VM Backup functionality (Would like something like veeam here)
• VM Replication functionallity (again veeam is nice, have not tested PHD Virtual box for xenserver)
• HA failover (both have this, see question below)

A question is, can either (or both) do HA failover without a dedicated/shared storage where the VM resides? It looks like only Esxi can do this so we might need to change our infrastructure if we leave vmware.

I think in either case we have a lot of learning to do when leaving the vMware camp.

 

[xena]

Two-Node High Availability Cluster - Proxmox VE
Of course not recommended for "mission critical" deployment but for "hobby" project why not?

 

[legen]

Two-Node High Availability Cluster - Proxmox VE
Of course not recommended for "mission critical" deployment but for "hobby" project why not?

I will look into it! Im going to post back here when we decide on what to go with or if i have more questions Thanks so far!