I have been recently trying different flavours of hypervisors.
I started with Windows Hyper-V, then moved onto Citrix XenServer. I decided to stick mainly to Xen, although I have been hit with the Citrix feature strip on the latest version. Now I am looking at moving on to a different platform, one that is completely open source and preferably under a free to use license.
I know of the new completely open source version of XenServer called XCP-ng, although I am unsure of sticking with XenServer. I was looking into oVirt, a very nice looking turnkey HV on CentOS.
I thought I would make a quick post up on here to see if anyone else uses anything else? Or if anyone has any tips about oVirt.
A straight Ubuntu server with Libvirtd+KVM is worth playing with. Bonus points if you’ve got another Linux box to manage it from. If not, maybe do Ubuntu desktop with Libvirtd+KVM. Managing VMs from the command line with virsh is nice, but Virtual Machine Manager is better and is definitely worth experiencing.
Hi folks, sorry I couldn’t get back to you. I was away on work. - The application is just a homelab and a web server really. Maybe some private gaming servers on some games. Only a single node.
I recently trialed ovirt and it certainly is pretty (if obtuse and ludicrously over-featured for my needs), but I ran into one aspect that troubled me relative to my current luddite/old skool virt-manager approach:
With both esxi and virt-manager, I have a pretty clear path to recovering the VMs to a new server if the current server dies with only needing access to the old server’s files. So, provided I’ve backed up recently and/or those files are on NFS, I can always extract the .vmx/.vmdk for vmware or the .xml/qcow2 from KVM to re-build those VMS on a new host.
ovirt seems to assume you can query the running server’s qemu and/or postgres DB to extract a VM for migration. At least for me in my basement, when things go wrong, they go big! I can’t count on having a mirror/ha server ready to fail-over. I have a host dedicated to KVMs of various sorts and if it fails, I cobble together a temp or permanent replacement on the spot, install CentOS and re-build the VMs from whichever backup survived whatever it was (no this doesn’t happen often, but when it does… )
With virt-manager, I have multiple hosts managed by a single client. I don’t have a whiz-bang web interface, but I can connect to SPICE on windows on linux desktops and now with WSL and vcxsrc, I can pop a virt-manager connected to my kvm hosts easily. So whatever I replace it with has a high bar to clear including disaster recovery.
How is proxmox disaster recovery subjectively? What does that flow look like? Is it easy to migrate a VM from the disk rather than queries of a running server?
Taking esxi/virt-manager as the baseline where you can move a disk image and .xml file to hand-migrate a VM. Generally much easier than trying to recover a DB state. The files are atomic/stand alone. Recover is pretty painless.
Assume your prior host is a crater in your rack where a server used to be, but its store was on an NFS mount that survived whatever it was that took out your host.
What I like to do. is keep a copy of the vmdk , qcow2, or raw disks. You can either create new confs or make a copy of them from /etc/pve/qemu-server/*.conf