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Linode turns 12! Goodbye Xen and welcome KVM!
Happy 12th birthday to us! Welp, time keeps on slippin’ into the future, and we find ourselves turning 12 years old today. To celebrate, we’re kicking off the next phase of Linode’s transition from Xen to KVM by making KVM Linodes generally available, starting today. What will happen to Xen Linodes? New customers and new Linodes will, by default, still get Xen. Xen will cease being the default in the next few weeks. Eventually we will transition all Xen Linodes over to KVM, however this is likely to take quite a while. Don’t sweat it.
Link to their blog post: https://blog.linode.com/2015/06/16/linode-turns-12-heres-some-kvm/
Comments
@AnthonySmith :P JP move?
No promo? damn
btw some one with account with them do they JP in stock ?
They've a stock for now. Go get it linode in JP
@Evengard ^
XEN better than KVM :P
I suspect this change like a few recently at Linode is being dictated by the losses to other providers such as DO.
No, migration to KVM is not because of DO. It's simply because it does give completely custom OSses and great performance (less steal time) while DO didn't do custom OSses for long time (I mean FreeBSD support and others) and only added it recently.
See this bench:
Xen (before migration)
Kvm (after migration)
XEN always faster for me, better performance
Do was an example but true of their rush to SSD. They said clearly in an interview at one stage they would were not moving to SSD but then doubled back as they realised their customers were rushing to DO or similar competitors for exactly that.
They said they would not drop their pricing then did.
All I am saying is none of these changes would have been as quick coming around at Linode had the market changes not forced them into it.
I don't think that I/O is typical even on their Xen nodes. Here is a bench of mine from an Xen node.
Though I agree with you, performance is certainly up. In one example UnixBench produced a score of 617 on an Xen node and 1753 on a KVM node.
Linode now seem to have a mix of E5-2680 v2/v3 processors too, the v3 having a lower clock speed at 2.5Ghz vs 2.8Ghz with the v2, but according to benchmarks performs a little better.
Yep they expensive but popular
I could get those KVM results on Xen, so not sure what the proves. Not that I bother with the numbers game really.
20$ a month for 2GB RAM, 48GB SSD and 3TB BW is hardly expensive. Let's say "they don't play the cheap game".
The reason why Linode didn't migrated to SSD urgently is because they're not bump and dump company (see DO main idea was to sell company from day one).
Linode don't need to this in RUSH. They're investing own company money!
DO did RAID5 to cut the cost and lost a lot of customers data!
Linode dropped price but increased resources for all packages because of 1GB Ram is at least required for all new OSses.
Chris made it very clear at the end of 2013 for example that Linode had no interest or plan to move to SSD, he (Linode) were comfortable that their setup at the time was more than adequate and their own benchmarking showed that. 4 months later they are rolling out SSD.
Not that I saying it's a bad thing, they do things really well and without compromise.
And umm, no not all their own money.
KVM in London:
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 0.954754 s, 1.1 GB/s
Xen in London:
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.11092 s, 967 MB/s
just upgraded my XEN to KVM ..took less than a minute.. Linode s great!
There is an option under Account > Account Settings now to default to KVM instead of building in Xen the switching in future.
Is Linode a subsidiary of Rackspace?
No, independently owned.
Thanks, not sure why Rackspace was showing up when searching for Linode. Technical terminology mixed with nicely mixed SEO keywords perhaps.
Can we please stop using a dd test as a measure of which virt type is best, the variables are VAST and no it is not even a good indicator.
good news though, researching the same thing myself Xen <> KVM swap, so far in testing I have been able to directly import the xen disk image in to kvm and boot without a single issue, only slight problem is windows with virtio drivers installed but that is easy to overcome.
Xen is probably on per imo in terms of performance however KVM is simply more flexible and support light and as such saves man hours.
Aww shush, it's not like the DD numbers change every time you run them or something stupid like that...
probably yes.
haha indeed or different hardware, cache sizes, setting, disks, amount of users, load, and it is not like its a constant environment dedicated to you.
It took me near 20 attempts to get the Xen numbers to go up to 967 MB/s above :P
No disrespect whatsoever but.. What makes Linode so popular is because of their QA / Support and longevity? There has to be a catch. Their prices seem a little bit higher than the average LEB? Their website is simple, clean and looks decent. They have been in the business industry for a while it seems but what's the catch there has to be something. Seems to good to be true.
Generally speaking, so is the quality of service and support. Not everyone starts their day saying "I'm going to buy the cheapest thing I see".