I am just posting to get some thoughts and opinions as to what hypervisor in my up coming rebuild. Currently I am running Unraid with KVM and Docker which is “working” when it wants to. Lately I have been unhappy with how certain things are implemented on Unraid which is making me look at systems that are built for being hypervisors and not a file server that has had it added on after.
My current setup is:
Ryzen 2700x
Crosshair Hero VII
32gb ram
3x 2tb sshd in the Unraid array
3x 500gb 970 evo nvme in the btrfs cache in RAID1
When Ryzen 3 is released I might swap the board and CPU out if there is a higher core count CPU. I would like to raid5 the nvme drives for fast storage and raid5 the spinning rust for slow storage. I do have some experience with ESXI from my last job but I am more than willing to learn to use something like Proxmox if it will do what I want and might make things easier to migrate.
your choices are basically, various frontends for qemu (and libvirt usually)
xen and various frontends for it,
and on the commercial side, esxi/vsphere and hyper V.
Play around and see what you like, there’s commercial versions of the prior 2 as well like citrix, xenserver, unraid etc so you really just have to go with the best fit for your needs.
hardware looks fine, the one thing is that people report performance degradations using images on btrfs, but if you don’t plan on storing them on that its not an issue.
complaints are generally, qemu being under heavy dev and releasing half baked sometimes, xen needing close attention to documentation, esxi emailing you constantly, and hyper-v costing what it does with a win server license.
In my experience, ESXi has the lowest barrier to entry, although if you have really simple requirements, you can control a simple kvm/qemu host with cockpit now.