[Info-vax] VMWARE/ESXi Linux

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 12/3/2024 7:41 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
> In article <vio70q$e1fp$1 at dont-email.me>,
> Arne Vajhøj  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> It's unclear what you think that KVM is.  KVM requires a
> userspace component to actually drive the VCPUs; that runs under
> Linux, which is a "full host OS."  At least Google uses the same
> management tools to drive those processes as it uses for the
> rest of its production services (e.g., borg, etc).  The
> userspace component for GCP is not QEMU, but rather, a Google
> authored program.  However, it is in all-respects just another
> google3 binary.

That is the general model.

central management server---(network)---management agent---hypervisor

Details can vary but that is the only way to manage at scale.

And which is why the claim that the hypervisor has to come with
a full host OS does not hold water for large production
environments.

They just need the very basic OS, the virtualization service
and the agent.

Google could tailor down the Linux KVM they use to the very
minimum if they wanted to. But I have no idea if they have
actually bothered doing so.

Arne