What virtualization VPS best for you?

dedica

New Member
What virtualization VPS would you choose?
XEN, KVM, OVZ, Hyper-V ? Or only the price is important for you?
 

Ilyas

New Member
Xen supports running two different types of guests. Xen guests are often called as domUs (unprivileged domains). Both guest types (PV, HVM) can be used at the same time on a single Xen system.

Xen Paravirtualization (PV)

Paravirtualization is an efficient and lightweight virtualization technique introduced by Xen, later adopted also by other virtualization solutions. Paravirtualization doesn't require virtualization extensions from the host CPU. However paravirtualized guests require special kernel that is ported to run natively on Xen, so the guests are aware of the hypervisor and can run efficiently without emulation or virtual emulated hardware. Xen PV guest kernels exist for Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and Novell Netware operating systems.

PV guests don't have any kind of virtual emulated hardware, but graphical console is still possible using guest pvfb (paravirtual framebuffer). PV guest graphical console can be viewed using VNC client, or Redhat's virt-viewer. There's a separate VNC server in dom0 for each guest's PVFB.

Xen Full virtualization (HVM)

Fully virtualized aka HVM (Hardware Virtual Machine) guests require CPU virtualization extensions from the host CPU (Intel VT, AMD-V). Xen uses modified version of Qemu to emulate full PC hardware, including BIOS, IDE disk controller, VGA graphic adapter, USB controller, network adapter etc for HVM guests. CPU virtualization extensions are used to boost performance of the emulation. Fully virtualized guests don't require special kernel, so for example Windows operating systems can be used as Xen HVM guest. Fully virtualized guests are usually slower than paravirtualized guests, because of the required emulation.

To boost performance fully virtualized HVM guests can use special paravirtual device drivers to bypass the emulation for disk and network IO. Xen Windows HVM guests can use the opensource GPLPV drivers. See XenLinuxPVonHVMdrivers wiki page for more information about Xen PV-on-HVM drivers for Linux HVM guests.

This is from http://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/XenOverview
XEN HVM is what we use mostly in our testing lab, it is stable and supports windows out of the box. But with today's technology I think it is best to leave the whole idea of creating a stable vps platform behind. Today's customers are far more interested in prebuild applications. This is where containers come into play. I really would take a look into Mesosphere, DC/OS, Kubernetes, Kuberdock,... with these platforms you can build enormous clusters where you can run containerized applications that provide 100% uptime if you can manage your hardware.

We have been experimenting with containers the past 3 months and it is looking very promising, although there is very little documentation about this it is definitely a path to look into.

as for OVZ and Hyper-V I can't say that much because I haven't really used them that much.
 

unixguru

New Member
If the host does not oversell, then OpenVZ offers the best performance, as there is no hypervisor, but the VPS is run in a container, a bit like docker, but with a whole operating system.
OpenVZ however can have a bad name due to some very cheap hosts seriously overselling their resouces, which is not as easily done on Xen or KVM.
 
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