How Complete is XenServer Really
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If you compare XS to its three competitors, how does it stack up?
- XS vs. KVM?
- XS vs. Hyper-V?
- XS vs. ESXi Free?
- XS vs. ESXi Essentials?
- XS vs. ESXi Essentials Plus?
Those are realistically the competitors to consider. If you go beyond ESXi Essentials Plus licensing, you'd likely go beyond XenServer to pure Xen anyway. Not quite, none of these have perfect one to one comparisons, but it's a starting point for discussion.
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XenServer is easy, it really is.
Setting it up, generally doesn't take a lot of effort, and the issues I had yesterday were due to my own misunderstanding of LVM.
So my question @FATeknollogee is where do you think the difficulty comes in?
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And the issues with the evening before were because of a spectacular and abnormally odd failure scenario.
Fortunately I have backups, and am restoring now.
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Guys, it's all the little detail stuff I'm talking about:
Everyone says yes boot off USB, yet it takes a massive thread to figure out logging!
Should things like that this not be baked in from the get go? -
If you are asking the question in regards to the third party software suppliers that support it, you have a smaller footprint and with good reason.
Unitrends supports XS, and is coming out with an XS7 version for beta soon if they haven't already.
@olivier came out with Xen Orchestra as an all-encompassing solution for the platform, and it's so simple to setup currently that all you need is a VM running debian or ubuntu. Run a one line command and you have a working, current solution.
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@FATeknollogee said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
Guys, it's all the little detail stuff I'm talking about:
Everyone says yes boot off USB, yet it takes a massive thread to figure out logging!
Should things like that this not be baked in from the get go?That was a mistake on my part, plain and simple. USB booting is a great thing, but XenServer doesn't intend you to work that way, sadly, so no, it is not baked in. Same with Hyper-V. Both support it, but require you to be an expert and do a lot of work yourself. They both design their system around using spinning disks. So if you are looking for general use, normal user, not a lot of work, you have to do things by convention. Same applies to any system.
So while "Everyone" said to use USB, that was people getting advice from me, not people following XS stated practices. And on a technical level, it works just fine and the issues we had here were lots of people unfamiliar with Linux, XenServer and logging to know how to do it. For people used to syslog, it's a trivial flip of a switch. But no one working on the issue was familiar with it. So that is misleading in a way, but the underlying issue was me mistakenly pushing an "expert" install mode when I should not have.
So blame me for that, not XS.
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@FATeknollogee said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
Everyone says yes boot off USB, yet it takes a massive thread to figure out logging!
Should things like that this not be baked in from the get go?So of my three competitors let's compare:
- KVM by Default: No
- ESXi by Default: Yes
- Hyper-V by Default: No
- XenServer by Default: No
So if the question is "should it", maybe. It's something I would like to see for sure. If the question is "is XS behind its competitors" the answer for that one issue is clearly "no, it is not behind." USB booting with no additional configuration is an ESXi unique feature.
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@DustinB3403 Don't forget to tell there is a commercial solution for companies wanting to have a turnkey+update+support with it
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@olivier said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@DustinB3403 Don't forget to tell there is a commercial solution for companies wanting to have a turnkey+update+support with it
I always do, I don't want you giving up!
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@olivier said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@DustinB3403 Don't forget to tell there is a commercial solution for companies wanting to have a turnkey+update+support with it
Of course!
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Don't get me wrong, I really like XS...
As a HyperV guy, if HyperV was setup like XS (instead of needing all the the domain BS just to connect) it would be much more successful, my 2 cents -
@BRRABill said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@scottalanmiller said
So blame me for that, not XS.
Oh I blame you, don't worry.
That's good.
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@FATeknollogee said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
Don't get me wrong, I really like XS...
As a HyperV guy, if HyperV was setup like XS (instead of needing all the the domain BS just to connect) it would be much more successful, my 2 centsWait... what? You don't need to be connected to a domain to use Hyper-V? Where did you get that idea from?
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@scottalanmiller said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@BRRABill said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@scottalanmiller said
So blame me for that, not XS.
Oh I blame you, don't worry.
That's good.
LOL.
All good. It was a learning process.
I have the ability to learn new stuff where I work.
I'm still not 100% sure what I would do. Now that it's working, it's fine. Not a blip in sight thus far.
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@coliver Let me re-phrase that.
You need a domain to take full advantage of the Hyper-V stack (is that better?) -
@FATeknollogee said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@coliver Let me re-phrase that.
You need a domain to take full advantage of the Hyper-V stack (is that better?)What features come from domain connectivity?
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@FATeknollogee said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@coliver Let me re-phrase that.
You need a domain to take full advantage of the Hyper-V stack (is that better?)Which features? Everything I'm aware of can be done without a domain.
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@coliver said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@FATeknollogee said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
Don't get me wrong, I really like XS...
As a HyperV guy, if HyperV was setup like XS (instead of needing all the the domain BS just to connect) it would be much more successful, my 2 centsWait... what? You don't need to be connected to a domain to use Hyper-V? Where did you get that idea from?
Why can't you just install Hyper-V & connect with a browser like ESXi or XO?
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@FATeknollogee said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@coliver said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@FATeknollogee said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
Don't get me wrong, I really like XS...
As a HyperV guy, if HyperV was setup like XS (instead of needing all the the domain BS just to connect) it would be much more successful, my 2 centsWait... what? You don't need to be connected to a domain to use Hyper-V? Where did you get that idea from?
Why can't you just install Hyper-V & connect with a browser like ESXi or XO?
What does this have to do with a domain? Even when connected to a domain you'd need Hyper-V Manager to do any management. This was a design decision, that was the wrong choice in my opinion, but has really nothing to do with functionality.
