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Xen VPS-- Are they KVM/HVM or PV? And prometeus's Xen in particular
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Xen VPS-- Are they KVM/HVM or PV? And prometeus's Xen in particular

When a provider says's their Xen, do they usually mean Xen PV or Xen HVM? It seems like most will simply list their various options as OpenVZ, Xen, KVM, but don't indicate which form of Xen.

In particular, can anyone say which is used by prometeas's Xen?

Do most providers, especially of HVM & KVM, allow iso uploads for a custom OS?
If they do, would it be an abuse to install something like ESXi to spin up my own VMs within the VPS? (Not to resell)

Comments

  • From XenPower, it's Xen PV. My VPS in Pune India, it's Xen PV too.

    Not all provider of HVM/KVM allowing ISO upload, but with iwstack, we can upload our own image with qcow format.

    Frontrangehosting KVM are allowed to link our own image, and then we can ask the support to add it temporary to our iso lists.

  • The most used is xen pv because of lower overhead than xen hvm. You don't need xen hvm or kvm unless you want to run something other than linux.

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran
    edited January 2014

    We use Xen-PV.
    Personally, I dont see any advantage of Xen-HVM over KVM even if I am Xen fan. This is changing, though.

    Unfortunately, as I said on the other thread we have no KVM in US, you need KVM to run nested virtualization. You could run on Xen, but you must know what you are doing. For example Virtualbox should run, though I never tried myself.

    Also we do not support KVM inside KVM, but you can run OVZ, LX, virtualbox, vmware player and other things.

  • Maounique said: For example Virtualbox should run, though I never tried myself.

    I've tried running Virtualbox inside Xen once, it didn't work. I tried that on Rackspace though, maybe it'd work on PV.

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran

    Either way for virtualization you need a dedicated server. It can run in a VPS, especially container based, but not all the time and it is not supported.
    I suggest getting one of those 30 $ dedicated servers, if possible with IPMI and you will learn a lot in the process.

  • Nested in PV is much less likely to be successful, certainly not without much larger performance hits. In KVM, the results can be quite nice: On my local setup, I see about a 7% performance hit when running nested-- tested with GeekBench, same VM running in 1st level virtualization vs running on a virtualized ESXi. In testing on a 1024 Digital Ocena instance, I actually get a much better desktop experience in a nested VM than I do in Amazon's EC2 Large instance.

    STABILITY is another issue entirely: As Maounique mentions, such things are not supported, and you'd be crazy to run anything in this way as a production setup... mine is personal convenience & academic purposes)

    I don't want a dedi because I don't want the hassle & potential failure points of a single hardware system.... basically I want a finite pool of resources within which I can run my own VMs at will-- this works nicely in DO's KVM, but their pricing doesn't scale nicely for minor, disk, and badwidth needs but heavier RAM needs. If there was something like a $15/month VPS reseller account that I could slice into one or two large chunks and a few small ones, that would be perfect. Instead, a moderately sized VPS with ESXi or VM Workstation would be almost as good. Either way I need H/KVM for one of the VMs, which will be windows-based. (licensed-- academic use dreamspark edition)

    Right now, I'm leaning towards trying one of prometeus's small KVM instances in the EU to see what kind of experience I would have in a remote desktop... if it works out, I'll go with one of their options. Otherwise, I'm considering just getting a 1GB Windows KVM and a few smaller linux PVs from a single provider yet to be determined

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