After a month of debate and experimentation, my employer has made the decision to use the open-source KVM virtualization infrastructure for migrating IT resources to a virtualized environment. Below, I discuss why we chose KVM over its (mostly proprietary) alternatives.
Until a couple years ago, the open-source community offered no real contender in the virtualization market. True, the qemu project has been around for a while, but qemu remains too inefficient for most production environments. Xen has also existed since 2003, but for a long time it only supported a limited set of guest operating systems, which did not include Windows until late 2005. As a result, proprietary virtualization products like VMware enjoyed a near-monopoly in the enterprise market until quite recently.
The rapid maturation of KVM, or ‘kernel-based virtual machine’, over the course of the last couple of years constituted the first open-source challenge to VMware. Integrated into the Linux kernel, KVM provides feature-rich and highly efficient virtualization.
My colleagues and I tested KVM (running on an Ubuntu 8.04 host) and ‘barebones’ VMware ESX server over the last several weeks. Ultimately, we decided KVM was a better fit for our needs based on the following considerations:
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http://www.workswithu.com/2009/04/27/kvm-vs-vmware-a-case-study/