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I'd say KVM has more potential for more features. I guess not having native CentOS 6 support is a pain point for Xen righ tnow.
@marcm 's repo and a few other places have Xen kernels and support for EL6
@DomainBop which isn't native.
But I remember KuJoe said Xen is pain to manage
CentOS shouldn't use such an ancient kernel. For almost two years now, Xen-support has been in the mainstream kernel, making it easily available to users. If RHEL ever upgrades to 3.0 (or 2.6.39+ I think)
Maybe @KuJoe would like to jump in and explain. I personally don't mind Xen. I really like it, actually, if you don't use it with a panel.
CentOS 7 will probably use the 3.x kernel lines. The 2.6.32 line is getting pretty old.
It's based on the CentOS 6 official Xen development kernels.
It's true that Xen support has been added to the kernel starting with 3.0, however you shouldn't really use Xen with a stock 3.0+ kernel because it's missing small things here and there that impair basic functionality. For example nodes don't reboot properly, vif interfaces randomly die and so on. RedHat gave up on Xen mostly because they acquired KVM, but also because they didn't want to maintain it anymore. KVM has come a long way, but back in the day it couldn't even come close to Xen. There are still a few things that Xen does better, like CPU allocation, auto I/O limitation, supports several networking types and so on. You can achieve similar results with KVM, but more work is required.
And now some salt and pepper: SolusVM doesn't master either of them. First of all SolusVM did not implement support for Xen 4.2 and the XL tool stack. If I'm wrong about this, please correct me. While SolusVM has added support for better CPU and QoS control for KVM, you have to do it manually for each VM, which sucks. I don't want to make a TL;DR so I'll stop here :-)
I was able to make KVM work on the first try. I was unable to make Xen work on the first try. So KVM is better
@shovenose Not really. Xen is a bare metal hypervisor, KVM is a kernel module, a few drivers, an emulator and a few tools. On the surface they might look the same, but underneath they work completely differently. There is a reason why Xen is used more than KVM in the Enterprise.
Interesting. I've not experienced such issues myself. Do you use CentOS as a host OS? My experience is mainly based around Debian/Ubuntu. This week is the first time I've set it up on CentOS, for my article this week. I've still got to install a machine and play with that. But I haven't had any issues yet.
@mpkossen Allot of testing goes into each Xen kernel before we deploy them on life nodes. I've seen such issues happen in the real world. If you download the source from http://repo.phoenixrpm.com you will see where the kernel originates, along with the gazillion Xen patches that fix all those issues :-)