[Info-vax] VMWARE/ESXi Linux

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/3/2024 3:24 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Dec 2024 09:40:40 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 
>> If you look at what is available and what it is used for then you will
>> see that what is labeled type 1 is used for production and what is
>> labeled type 2 is used for development. It matters.
> 
> What people discovered was, they needed to run full-fat system management
> suites, reporting tools, backup/maintenance tools etc on the hypervisor.
> In other words, all the regular filesystem-management functions you need
> on any server machine. So having it be a cut-down kernel (“type 1”) didn’t
> cut it any more -- virtualization is nowadays done on full-function Linux
> kernels (all “type 2”).

Having a full host OS is very nice for a development system with a few
VM's to build and test various stuff.

It does not scale to a large production environment. For that you need
central management servers.

ESXi has the vSphere suite of products. For many years the basic ESXi
was actually free and customers only paid for the advanced vSphere
stuff.

For KVM there are many products to choose from. Redhat has
Redhat OpenShift Virtualization (it used to be Redhat Virtualization,
but it came under the OpenShift umbrella when containers took
off). The big cloud vendors that may be managing millions of
servers must have some custom tools for that. You gave a link
to someone switching to the OpenNebula product. Proxmox VE is
another option. Lots of different products with different
feature sets to match different requirements.

Arne