[Weekly Poll] Favorite Virtualization Hypervisor

Hoping to bring back the weekly polls as they seemed to be pretty engaging. Here’s a new one for you all -

Which VM Hypervisor do you prefer for running virtual servers? Can be at home for a hobby, on a rented dedi for some productivity, or on your owned machines for your business.

Can select multiple if you use a mix-match for various purposes.

  • Microsoft Hyper-V
  • Xen / Citrix XenServer
  • Oracle VM VirtualBox
  • VMware Workstation/Player
  • KVM (cli-based)
  • Proxmox
  • VMware ESX/ESXi
  • Parallels
  • Docker
  • LXD / LXC
  • Something else (specify below)

0 voters

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I’ve been playing around with XCP-ng and I’ve been happy with the results so far.

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Interesting. I’ll have to give this a shot since the UI looks pretty simple and slick.

Xen is akin to LXC, right? They’re both container-based solutions?

It’s a tough call. I feel like my preference changes on use case.

Managed by someone else: KVM
Managed by me on server: OpenVZ
Personal desktop: Parallels
Minimalistic / per app containers: Docker

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I think I got on really well with Proxmox, but this was two years ago now.

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Proxmox has worked well for me in production for just around 4 years now. I’m very comfortable with it and rarely go looking for new solutions if something is working.

If I grab another box for testing at home I’ll probably throw XCP-ng on it, but again no real reason to move.

Pretty bummed about OpenVZ dying off. I really like it, as long as it’s running on bare metal in my control.

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I’ve been running proxmox on my server.

I have a VM per service, most of them are lxc containers (Debian and centos), and couple of KVM in the mix. I’m happy with this setup for my usage :blush:

Before that I had docker for a while but I never really got used to it

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bhyve (FreeBSD)

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I used to love VMware Workstation/Player, but it stopped working on my Mac. I installed VirtualBox and everything goes fine.

At the university we use VMware ESX.

For my business and hobby I use Proxmox.

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Each to their own, but personally the eol excites me as there’s some hosts I really like using it and I’m hoping it will encourage them to switch to KVM.

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I’m just salty because as soon as I get pretty close to mastering something, it hits EOL. lol

I’m currently working on getting better with LXC. Think I just need to invest a couple hours nailing down some templates and I’ll be set.

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You can have both. PV (paravirtualization) is similar to a container and HVM (Hardware Virtual Machine) is similar to KVM.

I recently found out about PVHVM that apparently has the best of both worlds, but I still need to do some digging on this one.

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Sweet! Thanks for the info. Will definitely need to give it a shot and see how I like it.

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Proxmox on my dedis, ESXi at home (next iteration will be proxmox) I look after a couple of hyper-v baremetal servers for customers and we have them at work and ESXi seems to be moving into legacy corner. Desktop wise I feel torn between hyper-v and virtual box, but normally settle on virtual box

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I fell in love with OpenNebula, the UI is so clean and it seems to work really well. Shame there is no good billing integration, would make a perfect KVM hosting panel.

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Proxmox for basically all the work stuff. On my workstation kvm cli.

Edit: Almost forgot we also have on legacy Hyper-V server for Windows. Almost no customers left there, hopefully we’ll soon be rid of it! :stuck_out_tongue:

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I tried OpenNebula and indeed the UI is very slick, but it didn’t seem to work very well out of the box. The different “drivers” for different storage backends also look a bit cumbersome and not well integrated into the UI.

Some of the features I need: increasing disk size, snapshots, etc didn’t work too well either, so my final impression is that it seems a very powerful and flexible platform but it may require some investment in configuration and fine tuning.

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