Visualisation

When is a ‘Box’ not a ‘Box’ ?

When it’s a virtual box of course.

Previously

Here at 3SL we’ve been using Hyper-V for most of our visualisation needs. On the whole its done a good job, but as we’ve been moving over to more and more Linux based systems we’ve been looking at alternative solutions to see how far we can reduce our dependence on Microsoft Windows.

Comparison

We looked at ESXi (from VMWare) – and then sat down after looking at the pricing for high availability, failover, and backup capabilities. Whilst undoubtedly suitable for a critical primary system,  the level of cover was more than strictly necessary in our test and development environment.
We looked as Xen (from Citrix) – and while it does plenty out of the box, it was still lacking in certain key functionality we were after. These included replication, failover, load balancing,  which, at the time,  were available as extra add-ons.

Currently

We’ve ended up with Proxmox (for now). It allows us to run a number of Linux services as containers (LXC, not Docker) as well as KVM-QEMU based VM for the few Windows systems we want to keep around (for testing and the like).

Its been handy to create an entirely self contained Cradle cluster behind a single external IP address with load balanced web access and VPN access for clients.