[PVE-User] Question

Martin Maurer martin at proxmox.com
Mon Jan 12 10:43:22 CET 2009


Hi again,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Venefax [mailto:venefax at gmail.com]
> Sent: Montag, 12. Jänner 2009 09:56
> To: Martin Maurer; 'proxmoxve'
> Subject: RE: [PVE-User] Question
> 
> Your perception of openVZ is flawed. I am a paying  customer of
> Virtuozzo
> and my experience is that unless you have support from Parallels,
> nothing
> would work, or everything would stop. OpenVZ requires to remember dozens
> of
> commands and complex concepts to operate with the technology, while
> Xen's
> learning curve is a lot shorter. Xen is easier to use and master than
> anything else. Furthermore, the whole idea of "jails" is out of favor
> because it does not truly isolate the performance of one container from
> the
> next. That's what I read in the magazines. 

OpenVZ on Proxmox VE is installed in 5 minutes, starting the first container is done in seconds. 
So you just need to know NO command line to operate OpenVZ on Proxmox VE. So I must point out that you are not up 2 date here?

BTW, to manage OpenVZ on the command line you will survive 99 % with one command: "vzctl"


> Xen is not going away because
> in
> the case if Linux virtual machines, it provides a better performance the
> KVM
> ever will, when you use paravirtualized guests. 

simple not true. You can run Linux on KVM also paravirtualized (virtio network/virtio block device) but OpenVZ virtualization is the number one choice for running Linux (if you need best performance).
Most people do not benchmark their virtualization technology - most are stucked in bad disk IO performance. If you compare XEN with direct mapped disk with KVM on Proxmox VE (with qcow2 disk) then it's clear that XEN is faster. But direct mapped disks are faster and not the XEN technology. If you compare qcow2 on XEN and KVM you will see that there is no difference - also clear as both uses qemu.

As you can see on our roadmap, we will introduce flexible storage pools in Proxmox VE, so you can choose the suitable IO disk system in future. If you use OpenVZ, you have native IO performance as the IO subsystem is NOT virtualized - this is the reason why you get a real performance advantage, especially if you run IO intensive database applications like our Proxmox Mail Gateway (commercial spam filter).  

> I have around 50 of
> them, in
> Suse hosts, but all my guests are Centos 64. It works fine. I understand
> that all hosting companies in the US use openVZ, but there is no money
> in
> hosting. It is a dead-end industry. 

Partly true. A lot of hosters makes good money with quality services. Do not forget all the companies doing complete outsourcing of their servers to hosting providers.

> Besides, all of them use Plesk, from
> Parallels, the maker of OpenVZ. I am using OpenVZ and will continue, but
> my
> company and my clients --all of them--, have 100% of their business in
> Xen.
> However, Windows performance in Xen is awful. I have already convinced
> myself that full-virtualization will be a KVM-Only realm. But remember,
> for
> every fully-virtualized VE, we have 100's of the other ones, Linux on
> Linux,
> para-virtualized. I also have two Hyper-V servers, and the performance
> is
> inferior to Xen, which is inferior to KVM.
> 
> Your concept of Cluster will compete head on with Xenserver from Citrix
> if
> you can add the three schemes together, Xen, Open-VZ and KVM. I could
> not
> envision wanting or needing anything else than Proxmox VE.
> Please understand one fact, if any. America is the largest economy, and

We believe KVM is the future and we will not use XEN in Proxmox VE - we have to focus on one technology and we decided to go for KVM due to many technical reasons (we read the source code, not the magazines :-) ).
(BTW, the European community is already larger than the US economy - but this is out of topic here ...)

> Americans cannot remember more than 10 commands. If they need to
> remember
> 11, they will find something else. That's why OpenVZ and Virtuozzo are
> dead-end technologies.

Container virtualization is already in the mainstream Linux Kernel, I do not believe Linux is a dead end technology.
BTW, KVM is also in the mainstream Linux Kernel, XEN is not (just some parts).

> A couple of days ago a had a machine go down,
> Virtuozzo-Windows, and it took the Russians 48 hours to get my clients
> back
> in business. I can document this. 

I cannot speak for Virtuozzo, but if you need to recover a Proxmox VE container, this is matter of minutes. (vzdump -r backup.tgz VMID)

I suggest we go back to Proxmox VE issues and do not talk about XEN or Virtuozzo. I assume other mailing list subscriber are not really interested in this so we can continue out of topic discussion in private emails.
Thanks for using Proxmox VE.

Br, Martin  

> No company can live with that. With
> Xen I
> can reinstall Linux, copy my files from backup and be again in business
> in
> less than 30 mins. I am not joking, it took 48 hours to the second line
> engineers to rebuild my Virtuozzo-Windows installation.
> Federico
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martin Maurer [mailto:martin at proxmox.com]
> Sent: Monday, January 12, 2009 3:35 AM
> To: Venefax; proxmoxve
> Subject: RE: [PVE-User] Question
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Venefax [mailto:venefax at gmail.com]
> > Sent: Montag, 12. Jänner 2009 09:06
> > To: Martin Maurer; 'proxmoxve'
> > Subject: RE: [PVE-User] Question
> >
> > Also in Enterprise, in the US, nobody uses Openvz. It is out of favor.
> 
> Yes, but we are working to change that :-)
> 
> OS virtualization has a lot of advantages compared to others and the
> main
> problem is that most people just do not know it yet.
> But also in US, a LOT of hosting companies uses OpenVZ.
> 
> > Everybody uses XEN when not paying for ESX. So if you could in your
> next
> > release provide the three types of virtualization together, it will be
> a
> > hit. But please do yourself a favor an create a "Clone" button.[Martin
> Maurer]
> 
> KVM is our choice as it is for most open source developer. Major open
> source
> virtualization companies are moving from XEN to KVM - the biggest one
> (Redhat) bought the KVM company and decided to drop XEN as soon as
> possible.
> Cloning: it would be nice, but it´s not the highest priority here. (see
> our
> roadmap, these features will be next).
> 
> Br, Martin
> 
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Martin Maurer [mailto:martin at proxmox.com]
> > Sent: Monday, January 12, 2009 2:51 AM
> > To: Venefax; proxmoxve
> > Subject: RE: [PVE-User] Question
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Venefax [mailto:venefax at gmail.com]
> > > Sent: Montag, 12. Jänner 2009 08:40
> > > To: Martin Maurer; 'proxmoxve'
> > > Subject: RE: [PVE-User] Question
> > >
> > > If you had a yearly support contract with unlimited questions, like
> > Red
> > > Hat,
> > > Suse and Canonical have, I would ask my boss to buy the
> subscription.
> > > This
> > > application is truly unique.
> > > In the US your business model as pay per incident will not fly.
> > > Federico
> >
> > Thanks for your point of view, we will think of extending the
> offering.
> >
> > >
> > > Best Regards,
> > >
> > > Martin Maurer
> > >
> > > martin at proxmox.com
> > > http://www.proxmox.com
> >
> 
> 





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