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Profitability.
Seems like the market for LEB likes to see "4-6-8GB for under 7 bucks", so openvz is the standard method of selling a machine in this manner it seems. I am sure Xen will continue to stay rare in this arena, and KVM will probably increase along with openvz offers. I still prefer Xen or KVM over OpenVZ.
Xen, in our opinion, offers a "premium" level of service compared to OpenVZ. While OpenVZ has gotten better over the years, Xen is the leader with regards to customer isolation and performance. It really does deliver the closest thing to a dedicated environment on shared hardware. Having said that, it does cost more to run Xen nodes, as it will not let you (by default anyway!) oversell RAM. When a Xen provider says they give you 512MB RAM, they give you 512MB RAM straight off the RAM chip.
This is why the likes of Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Platform use Xen as their hypervisor technology. It is simply excellent for serious hosting.
Even though it does cost more to run, we still have packages available at Low End prices. However, we are by no means the cheapest and never will be, however the quality of service that Xen provides is highly recognised within the LEB community, so it's never stopped us being successful here
Yes, we are exclusively a Xen provider and yes, we are very proud of it
LET/LEB/VPSBoard are just a tiny niche of the virtualization market and aren't representative of the entire market. Xen is still very widely used, and in the enterprise and cloud segment of the market Xen is much more widely used than KVM or OpenVZ.
from Wikipedia:
Ralias said:
The list of profitable major providers using Xen negates the profitability argument. The reason many low end providers aren't able to turn a profit with Xen, or even with openvz in many cases, is because they tend to have limited experience running a business (especially the kiddie hosts) and have poorly thought out business plans that revolve around an artificial $7 price barrier.
Totally Agree
Click click vs sysadmin skeeeeellz.
And/or people naturally being followers/playing it safe.
Why is windows still dominate desktop.
I'm not arguing that it's unprofitable. I'm just saying it's harder to profit on. Thus, less people dip their feet in the pool.
I still do Xen as a primary platform, it just works it is incredibly stable in comparison, churn rate is low because it also just works for customers and it feels like a stable base to build a business on.
I may consider building a commercial budget service on OpenVZ now that the foundations of the business are solid enough, it is literally insane how much you can over provision OpenVZ by i.e. 800% before hitting any stability issues if managed correctly.
That said from recent reading it looks like Xen are making a move towards over provisioning of Ram and removing the physical limits in near future which is a good step forward and will probably be a game changer.
KVM was full of big ideas and promise but ultimately delivered a high overhead system, it is still young though so no doubt in 3 years that will change.
We prefer Xen VPS too, much better than OpenVZ base our test.
We have sold premium xen biz packages and SSD xen till we were out on many servers, now have only in US and will be launching in Pune shortly.
I absolutely love Xen, however, people compare Xen with KVM considering the features of Xen-PV and speed of Xen-HVM and KVM does float in those conditions.
The reason Proxmox had to do a painful merger between ovz and kvm is because KVM does not have a PV version, even with virtio is far slower than Xen-PV and has bigger overhead. XenServer or XCP, on the other hand, only needs one hypervisor and the kernel does not have to be antiquated and patched like hell to allow OVZ, that will be a major problem in the future, IMO.
It'll definitely be interesting to see how it evolves. For now, we're fans of Xen-PV.
So how does KVM compare - overhead-wise - to Xen HVM, do you know? I mean, oranges should be compared with oranges, don't you think?
You are referring to Xen PV, I presume? Better in what way? What kind of test are you referring to exactly...?
Are you saying KVM has higher overhead than Xen HVM? Or are you comparing KVM to Xen PV?
@andrzej I am saying in my experience performance of virtual machines running under KVM starts to degrade after 75 - 80% capacity on the node the load on the hypervisor can get out of control, while Xen PV or HVM will run up to 100% capacity without suffering the same loss over overall performance.
This in my opinion is the advantage of the Xen separation model, while KVM just runs VM's as an individual process, it is fairly obvious that the overhead is going to be higher that way.
I see KVM as merging Xen with OpenVZ and perhaps someone did not really pick the best bits of either however I have no doubt that given time KVM will shine.
Interesting. Is this true (the advantage of the Xen separation model) for both Xen PV and Xen HVM as well? (It was my understanding that Xen HVM was pretty much akin to the way KVM works)
While on this subject: is it possible to run Xen PV and Xen HVM VM's on the same node?
In simple terms Xen HVM is very similar in functionality to KVM but it does not work in the back end in the same way, and yes you can run HVM and PV on the same node.
Yes.
XEN include XEN-PV and XEN-HVM, you can find many compare articles between XEN and OVZ, try google it
@ComfortVPS: hmm, yes, I think I've heard before of this "google" you mention
) However, you said that you had carried out your own tests, hence my question. Never mind.
The high overhead slow speed arguments are getting tired and outdated. KVM has made big improvements on both those things. I think mainly due to improvements in virtio.
If you are so concerned with overhead then you should be using OpenVZ instead of Xen anyways.
For me OpenVZ works for most things and is easy to use from an administrator point of view. For the things it does not work for I used KVM.
KVM is pretty much the defacto standard for Cloud platforms moving forward so good luck to all you people clinging to your Xen.
riiiight.... lol, name 3 big cloud players that use KVM.
Is that a trick question or are you just clueless?
OpenStack,
Cloudstack,
Eucalyptus
great.... now name 3 big players in the cloud hosting industry that use KVM
Rrright, so clueless then.
KVM is growing but is unlikely to become the "defacto standard" for a few reasons:
VMWare has 73% of the virtualization market, Hyper-V is second at 14%, and KVM is a distant third at 4%, OracleVM and Xen are tied at 3% marketshare.
http://wikibon.org/w/images/8/8f/MultiHypervisorGrowthFigure4.png
the majority of people have no plans to use OpenStack:
http://wikibon.org/w/images/0/0a/OpenStack_Survey.png
further reading
tl;dr KVM might gain some market share but it won't become the "defacto standard" because the enterprise segment of the market (which is much bigger than the sub $7 LEB segment :P ) has no intentions of switching to KVM or OpenStack.
haha, ok you go tell amazon to keep clinging to Xen or to use the google.
FYI the 3 software vendors you mentioned all fully support Xen and 2 of them (possibly all 3) supported Xen first.
The only major player to my knowledge that uses KVM is Digital Ocean and they nest the kernel hence the lack of windows support and frankly it might as well be OpenVZ as a result.
It was a genuine question by the way but you obviously feel strongly enough to throw your baseless facts around and tell people to use google and call people clueless rather than make any attempt to back it up so I guess this conversation is over.
Going to be fun seeing the switch when Xen remove the physical memory limits in the near future.
I consider Vmware to be a separate category alltogether. Just considering OpenVZ, Xen, KVM for this discussion.
BlueVM, ChicagoVPS, DigitalOcean.
Do I win?
Uh... isn't OracleVM just a pretty shell ontop of xen?