New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
which is best virtualization technology for windows guest os
BecomeWebHost
Member
I came across vSphere Hypervisor, xen, kvm, openVz while googling my way arround.
I want to use it to install windows 7, 8, 10, server 08, 12 vps in it.
is hyper-v a good option since it's windows guest? which will give best performance?
thanks.
Comments
You can eliminate openvz straight away, it wont run Windows.
KVM is good, and runs fine.
I have never used it, but Hyper-V is Microsoft's virtualization technology.
Windows doesn't run on OpenVZ (Linux only).
is hyper-v a best option since it's windows guest?
Hyper-V would almost certainly run Windows more efficiently. KVM would probably be easier and quicker.
Install the virtIO drivers if using a windows guest, otherwise the disk I/O tends to be terrible.
I would use KVM. Here is a guide if you need help. http://www.funtoo.org/Windows_7_Virtualization_with_KVM
In your case I would also recommand hyper-v.
Hyper-V or Xen would be your best bet.
From our previous experiences, if you are running 'pure' (only) Windows VM, Hyper-V would be the only choices to have a very stable environment.
If you are running a combination between Windows and Linux (there are linux and windows vm on the same machine) then Xen would probably your best bet. While KVM would suffered in I/O in doing this (except you are running 'pure' Linux then KVM would be your best bet). Although, I don't have any evidences representing the opinion. @Anthonysmith might share his experiences, as well, in using Xen, as a Type-1 Bare Metal Hypervisor
In my experience, if your already running windows as a host machine its much easier to add hyper-v and use that, however, performance wise I can't comment as I have never used windows for a production machine.
Vmware has been the easiest for me to get running, the vswitch is by far the best imo. Two IP's one for host and a second for a gateway vm like pf sense and your good to go.
Esxi or Hyper-v probably?
In my opinion it would vary based on your use case, but one thing I will say is that in the newest versions of Xen the HVM (full emulation) environment is Qemu now anyways (KVM). Depending on the version used it can be more efficient to just use KVM directly (as you get the advantage of the KVM kernel modules instead of just vanilla qemu or qemu-dm). The only benefit you would get with Xen is if you also wanted to run Linux guests, I find Xen PV to be a bit more performant.
There is also VirtualBox if all you are doing is wanting to run a sandbox, you could run it remotely on a dedicated server easily and it has a easy to use GUI, however, this wouldn't be something you would want to use in a production environment (just my opinion).
Hyper-V then of course is Microsoft's own technology, so of course it is tuned to run Windows most efficiently but licensing can get costly. KVM is the best 'free' option out there with Proxmox having a free version that installs it for you it becomes even easier.
my 2 cents.
Cheers!
Hyper-V would be your best bet based on our experience with various types of virtualizations: Hyper-V/KVM/VMWare. Hyper-V runs fine even on a SATA drive with couples of VMs - where VMWare/KVM would hang.
Thanks everyone for their view...
I will go with Hyper-v for now as suggested by most of you for the best performance...
can anyone suggest how many vm's (windows 10) I will be able to run on with normal browsing activity (selenium webdriver - automated). server specs are: Core™ i5-2300, 16 GB ram, 2TB hdd
Hyper-v is most efficient
KVM is the easiest
Xen is a mess
6-8 VM's but you would max out the CPU for sure. If you intent to do anything that requires moderate amount of resources 4 is max. If you set 1 Core for each VM's it wont be efficient. Instead set 4 cores for all VM's so each of them has access to 100% of your resources.
We (my company) use Hyper-V and ESXi with Windows guest.
ESXi is easy to set up, runs very nicely, and really is a bare metal hypervisor.