On Wed, Nov 07, 2012 at 01:33:41PM +0100, Sašo Kiselkov wrote: > On 11/07/2012 01:16 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > I'm very interested, as I'm currently working on an all-in-one with > > ESXi (using N40L for prototype and zfs send target, and a Supermicro > > ESXi box for production with guests, all booted from USB internally > > and zfs snapshot/send source). > > Well, seeing as Illumos KVM requires an Intel CPU with VT-x and EPT > support, the N40L won't be usable for that test.
Ok; I know it does support ESXi and disk pass-through though, and even the onboard NIC (though I'll add an Intel NIC) with the HP patched ESXi. > > Why would you advise against the free ESXi, booted from USB, assuming > > your hardware has disk pass-through? The UI is quite friendly, and it's > > easy to deploy guests across the network. > > Several reasons: > > 1) Zones - much cheaper VMs than is possible with ESXi and at 100% > native bare-metal speed. I use Linux VServer for that, currently. It wouldn't fit this particular application though, as the needs for VM guests are highly heterogenous, including plently of Windows (uck, ptui). > 2) Crossbow integrated straight in (VNICs, virtual switches, IPF, etc.) > - no need for additional firewall boxes or VMs ESXi does this as well, and for this (corporate) application the firewall is as rented service, administered by the hoster. For my personal small business needs I have a pfSense dual-machine cluster, with fully rendundant hardware and ability to deal with up to 1 GBit/s data rates. > 3) Tight ZFS integration with the possibility to do VM/zone snapshots, > replication, etc. Well, I get this with an NFS-export of an all-in-one as well, with the exception of zones. But, I cannot use zones for this anyway. > In general, for me Illumos is just a tighter package with many features > built-in for which you'd need dedicated hardware in an ESX(i) > deployment. ESX(i) makes sense if you like GUIs for setting things up In a corporate environment, I need to create systems which play well with external customers and can be used by others. GUIs are actually very useful for less technical co-workers. > and fitting inside neat use-cases and for that it might be great. But if > you need to step out of line at any point, you're pretty much out of > luck. I'm not saying it's good or bad, I just mean that for me and my > needs, Illumos is a much better hypervisor than VMware. Thanks! _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
