[Info-vax] VMWARE/ESXi Linux

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/3/2024 9:33 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 12/2/2024 10:09 PM, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
>> Matthew R. Wilson <mwilson at mattwilson.org> wrote:
>>> KVM is largely dependent on qemu to provide the rest of the actual
>>> virtual system. qemu's a great project and I run a ton of desktop VMs
>>> with qemu+KVM, but it just doesn't have the level of maturity or
>>> edge-case support that ESXi does. Pretty much any x86 operating system,
>>> historical or current, _just works_ in ESXi.  With qemu+KVM, you're
>>> going to have good success with the "big name" OSes...Windows, Linux,
>>> the major BSDs, etc., but you're going to be fighting with quirks and
>>> problems if you're trying, say, old OS/2 releases. That's not relevant
>>> for most people looking for virtualization solutions, and the problems
>>> aren't always insurmountable, but you're claiming that KVM is a "better"
>>> solution, whereas in my experience, in reality, ESXi is the better
>>> technology.
>>
>> What you wrote is now very atypical use: faithfully implementing
>> all quirks of real devices.  More typical case is guest which
>> knows that it is running on a hypervisor and uses virtual
>> interface with no real counterpart.  For this quality of
>> virtual interfaces matters.  I do not know how ESXi compares
>> to KVM, but I know that "equivalent" but different virtual
>> interfaces in qemu+KVM may have markedly different performance.
> 
> Are you talking about paravirtual drivers?
> 
> To get back to VMS then I don't think VMS got any of those.

Hmm. Not correct. Reading 9.2-3 installation notes:

<quote>
Also, two para-virtualized NICs, virtio for KVM, and VMXNET 3 for ESXi.
</quote>

Arne