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I used virtual box before to test OS installation on my own personal computer. I'm not sure if it's suitable for actual virtualization on live servers. I mostly hear about Xen for that. Is virtualbox at the same level (production environment virtualization)? and what other alternatives are there, other than Xen?

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up vote 13 down vote

One notable thing that I feel has been left out is that VirtualBox is an entirely different class of virtualization. VirtualBox falls under the category of "workstation virtualization" (also known as Desktop virtualization) which is fine and dandy, but it doesn't really compare to Microsoft's Hyper-V or VMWare's ESXi.

Hyper-V, ESXi, KVM, and Xen are all hypervisors - they are tiny OS's that do one thing: run VMs. You don't really interact with them after setting them up. (You can, and should regularly, but it is not the primary machine you interact with. Just make sure it's updated, etc.)

VirtualBox is much more similar to VMWare Server or Microsoft's Virtual PC. That is not to say you can't do anything within VirtualBox that you can't do in, say, Xen, but it's not the goal.

Given all that, though, I would personally not recommend VirtualBox for a production environment - not a lot of trust there, since you have to run a full OS below it (rather than the slimmed down, small footprint hypervisors mentioned earlier). I do love it, though, for testing a server on my workstation and then deploying it to the ESXi cluster we have once I've ensured it meets all the requirements.

(whew, that was a big post. yay virutalization class in college!)

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Well explained. One thing to note, however, is that Hyper-V is not really a true bare metal hypervisor like the ESX and Xen products. It generally runs on top of Windows (although it is still a hypervisor). The stand-alone Hyper-V server has a much smaller footprint than running on top of a full Windows server, but many parts of Windows are still there. Well stated answer, and I agree, VirtualBox is not intended to run production VMs but is well suited for use in development work on a desktop machine. – Rob Jun 16 '11 at 20:49
@Rob - Even ESXi still has a lot of its Linux underpinnings -- I consider the two to be equivalent personally. You draw the line exactly where I do: VirtualBox for testing on my workstation, VMWare or HyperV for production virtualization, VM Labs, etc. – voretaq7♦ Jun 16 '11 at 21:20
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up vote 8 down vote

The Gold Standard for server virtualization is VMWare VSphere (ESXi). Microsoft's Hyper-V Server is a close second. Both are free (as in beer) for their basic editions.

VirtualBox is great for testing, but it lacks many of the enterprise features available in VMWare of Hyper-V. Similarly Xen is a great platform, but lacks some of the flexibility you get from the two options I mention above.

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But Microsoft Hyper-V is only for machines running Windows, not Linux, right? Also, can you give me an idea what are some of the features that Xen lacks? – sameold Jun 16 '11 at 18:03
@sameold - Hyper-V works just fine with Linux. I'm hosting about 30 Centos servers via hyper-v and they're all running great. I'm not super familiar with the Debian/Ubuntu line so I cant say for sure on those even though I have read about people having success with them. – ErnieTheGeek Jun 16 '11 at 18:16
Hyper-V is a hypervisor - It supports Linux guest operating systems. Re: features Xen is lacking, it's mostly in the areas of failover and recovery ("Extra cost" features from VMWare, not sure about their status with Hyper-V), and the fact that Xen (in my experience) requires jumping through more hoops when trying to install (e.g.) Windows. – voretaq7♦ Jun 16 '11 at 18:20
The free Hyper-V server has the clustering/HA features built in. – ErnieTheGeek Jun 16 '11 at 18:30
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up vote 4 down vote

I wonder why nobody mentioned KVM - it is a type 1 hypervisor, has been around for years now, and it performs really well. The management utilities can provide all the enterprisey features

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Good point. Low foot print, comes with the kernel, and is comming standard with some operating systems like Ubuntu 11.04 Server. On the other hand, KVM can be quite involved in setting up if you are not already familiar with linux. – hydroparadise Jun 16 '11 at 18:23
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not in any modern distro, if you want the basic features. And if you're using the enterprisey KVM management solutions, things are even easier. I've just installed a rhel6 machine on my desktop, couple of clicks in anaconda, and I have a ready virt-manager based, gui driven hypervisor – dyasny Jun 16 '11 at 19:49
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I left out KVM because of the number of caveats in its supported guest OS list -- It's not a bad option, I just think there are better ones :) – voretaq7♦ Jun 16 '11 at 21:22
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hmm, I never thought the lack of support for OS/2 was a caveat... – dyasny Jun 17 '11 at 7:37
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up vote 2 down vote

As voretaq7 mentions, VMWare Mircrosft Hyper-V packages are good choices for indutrial strength virtualization packages. But at the same time, I personally am using VirtualBox in our production enviromnet as a secondary Active Directory/DNS server and has been working pretty solid thus far. It's great for those that are teetering on Virtualization, but not quite sold on the idea. Those industrial strength, however, are a little more involve in setting up (not by much) and are great once you have decided to bring virtualization into your enviroment. VirtualBox is nice because its supported across almost all OS's and can bring up a VM on almost PC that is capable in terms of hardware.

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up vote 1 down vote

As Voretaq says, generally no Virtualbox, and other type 2 hypervisors, are not production environment ready. Most virtualization implementations that you will be using at an enterprise level have more features then just being able to virtualize. There are basic features you want, such as cloning VMs, template creation, etc. There are enterprise features such as (using VMware terminology for these ideas) High Availability (HA), VM migration across hosts (vMotion), Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS), Fault Tolerance (FT), storage vMotion, and SAN bootable. All of these features are there to help minimize your downtime, which isn't acceptable for a production environment.

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