Hyperconverged Hypervisor options [Discussion]

[Levi]

I'm currently on a quest to build The Ultimate Off-grid SOHO Server Rack (MegaThread). In order to design the Servers I first need to settle on a hypervisor to run.

Current State
Discuss --> Plan --> POC/Test --> Implement/Automate --> Backup/Monitor --> Reiterate

Goals

• Hyper-converged - No dedicated storage or fancy networking backplane. Just some servers that are working together as a cluster to run VM's.
• Live migrations - I want to be able to unplug a server with 5 vm's on it and within a minute or two they are running on another node as if nothing ever happened.
• Low node count - I have a power budget of about 400 watts total? So the minimum node count matters. For Microsoft failover clusters you need S2D to be completely converged (I think) and that requires a minimum of 4 nodes. Ideally if I could get away with 2 nodes I might try it

Contenders

Name	Pros	Cons	Requirements
Hyper-V failover cluster	Really smooth VM migrations, easy to setup	Pretty hefty system requirements like windows datacenter edition licenses	Requires minimum 4 node S2D setup
ESXi	???	I had a terrible time with the free license	???
Harvester	Brings VM migrations to K8's, FREE	Early alpha/beta. Restricts access to the underlying OS.	Probably 3 nodes like K8's
XEN	???	???	???
Proxmox	???	???	???
Kubernetes	Pretty easy to run workloads on	No live migrations, containers only	3 nodes

If you can name more hypervisors or list some pros and cons, that would extremely helpful.

 

[Vesalius]

Proxmox is free to use, with paid support options. You only miss out on the enterprise package repository, but that comes from the community repository that you can use freely. Has vm and Lxc migration. LXC are really lightweight options to run most Linux based operations systems. Can use Ceph from the GUI, but plenty of tutorials on setting up gluster for shared storage. STH has run a series on Proxmox so check their articles.

I run it at home on pretty minimal hardware.

Proxmox VE 6.4 Released

Proxmox VE 6.4 is out and along with it come new features like Single-File Restore, Live Restore, and selecting the version of Ceph needed.

www.storagereview.com

 

[wifiholic]

I currently run a 3 node oVirt cluster with hyperconverged storage using Gluster. It's been a good experience, and the only reason I'm planning to replace it with a VMware vSAN cluster in the near future is for professional development. Anyhow, oVirt may be worth a glance; it's fully open source (it's the upstream of Red Hat Virtualization), and the hardware requirements aren't too onerous.

 

[Stephan]

Live-Migrations used to be a premium feature but pretty much everyone can do this in 2021 correctly. I would look at your backup MUST-HAVEs first. What if things go south? That will eliminate choices. Personally I like to-disk backups, but I also like to-tape for long-term storage. In case the house burns down, or your cat deletes everything while dancing on the keyboard by accident and you aren't looking.

On the purely "free" side people on this board seem to like ProxMox, oVirt and Xen Orchestra.