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Ask slashdot: Which 100+ User Virtualization Solution Should I Use?

Posted by samzenpus on from the best-of-virtual-class dept.

Gonzalez_S writes "Let's say you need to give access to 100+ users to create their own virtual machines and devices (eg. switches, .., ms windows or linux family) in a manageable and secure way. Which virtualization solution would you choose? There are vmware, xen, kvm, .. based solutions, but which one would you prefer and why? The solution should be stable, manageable, scriptable and preferably have ldap integration. In this case I also need to setup a playground for IT students, next to hosting production servers on the same system."

4 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Hyper-V or vSphere. by tysonedwards · · Score: 5, Informative

    Considering that you are likely out of an educational institution, Microsoft likely provides you with free licenses for their products. As such, Hyper-V and SystemCenter would provide you with a fairly good experience that is easy to manage and automatically deploy based off of Active Directory. It is a solution that will likely meet all of your stated requirements and your other likely needs and wants in a package that is "good enough".

    If you have a budget, consider VMware's vSphere offering. It can get pretty expensive (license costs greater than that of your physical hardware) however it is currently best-in-class and provides some truly amazing administration tools.

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  2. Proxmox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's free and offers higher performance than VMWare (which as far as ESXi 5 goes) sucks.

    You can create users with privilege levels as expected and you may also cluster several servers together (as you can with other solutions).

    You can also do containers OR a full virtual machine depending upon the OS you are trying to emulate.

    Give this a shot before paying for any of the software others have recommended. Our company has switched all virtualized servers to run on Proxmox hosts and the uptime is 100% with MANY users.

  3. KVM by Zeromous · · Score: 5, Informative

    End of story, everything else here is overkill. KVM sounds just about right for your needs and is very stable and FREE.

    You can provide people with a variety of images and single command to deploy them (without root). It's not even that hard to setup. The hard part really is setting up an LDAP server to meet your needs.

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  4. oVirt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    www.ovirt.org

    Full VM solution, for free. What more do you want. Easy to setup, easy to use, easy to control. It has LDAP integration.