Posts by cyberkrb 4 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Mar 2021
There ARE trial XO licenses. In fact, the freemium model that it is based upon quite encourages you to enable the free time-limited (30 days) trial from within the web interface....
You might not like the interface, the model, the features or the company making it... but that was inaccurate.
I can undestand that you didn't quite (enormous understatement I'd say) like your experience with Xen-Orchestra, but that doesn't justify the lies.
* Xen, the hypervisor, is well alive and kicking, thank you.
Lately specializing on "the other architecture" (i.e. arm64) and focusing on embedded workloads (e.g. automotive)
* AWS did use Xen as their hypervisor. They later migrated over to Nitro, their own concoction.... which isn't quite KVM, by the way
(Whereas everything else, including Nutanix's AHV, is based on KVM AFAIK)
...which means that, yes, Xen can manage hyperscale workloads too (AWS wasn't significantly less "ginormous" back then as compared to present size -- same league of "infinity")
* Citrix XenServer is probably mostly a dead-end, yes.... but the Hypervisor project (for the backend) and VATES' virtualization stack/XenOrchestra (and maybe even XOSAN --- haven't tried so can't comment) (for the frontend) are truly alive and releasing new versions regularly (including all kind of security patches), with a good and expanding ecosystem of partners.
But, what would I know.....
- Experienced Xen hypervisor user+sysadmin since Dec 2006 (yes, we had to patch our own kernels back then)
- At some time, even Citrix Partner (2010-2014)
- Have moderate experience with XOA... though we mostly manage our in-house fleet (smallish MSP) with our custom-built tools, and have done so essentially "forever"
and, well, my experience with KVM and KVM-derived products is quite less than stellar. Maybe I'm very much used to Xen's "just works" ---at least for my use cases--- rather than having to wrestle with a myriad of half-cooked third-party tools which don't quite fit anything but the most basic use cases.
Moreover, anything Xen I have used (except for XSR5.5) is way more stable, predictable, diagnoseable and repairable (IME) than even the most expensive VMware toolstack. YM *will* Vary.
I do agree with some other comentards, though, in that most "sub-hyper" CSPs (on KVM) must be running their own toolstacks (just like we do, on Xen)
...but you were referring to Enterprise/Mid-Enterprise kind of workloads, weren't you ?
I guess in your world, anyone who doesn't blindly agree with you / don't have the same experience must be "insane"... ah, the youngsters xD
The time estimate depends on the process and the resources involved. Our team can very probably do it in about one year with high guarantees (been doing migrations for over 12 years now), but the actual mileage may vary ;)
The alternative I would really suggest looking at is XCP-ng+Xen-Orchestra (and maybe even with XOSAN if really evaluating Nutanix, too). Please feel free to contact me directly if you require more details (or fancy a free consultation on migration procedures/support)
Disclaimer: been using Xen-based virtualization almost exclusively since 2006, XenServer since late 2009, XCP-ng since 2018... and have extensive experience with several versions of VMware, some with Hyper-V and Proxmox and exposure to Nutanix. IME XenServer/XCP is the most robust and flexible platform of them all: We could always recover from "disasters" (caused by other parts of the stack failing, mostly due to sheer abandonment) and grave human error in relatively short time and with no data loss. HA implementation is quite robust, too.
You have clearly NEVER used Debian professionally, right?
Some data points:
- I still have nightmares about "RPMhell" from years ago. Last time I tried, the situation with dependencies was better (since RH cloned Debian's APT in the form of YUM) but tended to explode at the worst moment with no way back.
- The unofficial slogan for Debian happens to be "...when you've got better things to do than fix systems"
- Huge ISP/MSPs depend on Debian... that's not a coincidence.
- Most full- or half- time Debian Developers are paid by companies to do so. And specifically not that many are paid by Canonical, by the way...
- RedHat's support really isn't good. Enough to CYA, yes. But it doesn't actually solve very complex problems --- i.e. same as Cisco's TAC, only a bit better
there's a reason SuSE makes *loads* of money selling support for RHEL (and they really aren't much cheaper)....
- QA for packaging / overall distro stability and Debian's own software IS actually top notch:You''d believe that when ~2000 people spend about 18 months stabilising and polishing the overall distribution and how it fits together, the result should be at least "decent"... and that's not considering the over ~20k packages in Debian vs about ~3K in RHEL (or Ubuntu).
And well, RH's insistence to force their sometimes ill-conceived software ---I personally *like* systemd--- like SSSD and all kind of dbus concoctions down your throat, only to "differentiate" (read: make you actually need their support) from the competition.... well, I'd rather not.
But YMMV, of course
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