XCP-NG vs Xen vs XenServer vs KVM vs Proxmox

is this video literally just a summary of an article

I wonder if it will be possible to integrate some of the open source gpu multiplexing into xen once the project is more mature. From what I understand, it will not take long to integrate it into KVM, but Xen is a whole different animal.

Hey Tom great videos, perhaps you can tell us if the is a backup solution in XCP, proxmox, etc that allows you to restore OS single items, I'm talking about veeam-vmware solution were you can restore individual user files or application items. A mayor thing that keeps me out of things like XCP is the backup solution built around it, by no means veeam is perfect but allows me to do amazing stuff just like I said before.
Restore individual items and stuff, cloud connect or the availability to attach S3 object storage for remote immutable backups, tape support, etc, are a few things that people still use out there or rely on to keep a 3-2-1 backup solution.
I think that this kind of thing should be taking in consideration when you compare products, its not the hypervisor and the orchestrator alone but the entire ecosystem around them.

Thanks

Watching your TrueNAS Core vs TrueNAS Scale video, you mention XCP-NG as your virtualisation platform for which I went "What's that?". XCP-NG website is littered with your videos and I watch some, including this one. You probably can guess by now what I am aiming to do. So, maybe I will give SCP-NG a try instead of TrueNAS Scale, although I was hoping for containers integration too (which I can probably do on XCP-NG with a VM running Portainer). Thanks for guiding my choices with your excellent reviews Tom.

mic low mids-upper bass is too boosted imo

I was working with AWS when they went with KVM and at that time they were requiring users to shutdown and restart VMs as part of the cutover. If they weren't moving existing systems to the new KVM stack then why many everyone do that?

I would be happy with proxmox if it could support my EVE-NG pro vm and it's nested virtualization, but it can't =\

promox in my opinion more user friendly for operation customization, and installation...

I would like to know, do you have any videos on how to create a fax server in proxmox, freepbx, or xenserver?

This is the first video I've watched from you, immediately subbed!!!
For the last 2 days I've been trying to get KVM run at near bare metal performance on my old laptop so I can remotely access my VMs from my M1 mac.
I've never done this before, been reading a lot of docs, articles and just got more and more confused by the whole KVM/XEN/QEMU thing as many projects I've stumbled upon use two of these at the same time, PLUS LIBVIRT.
I feel like I finally understand it all a little bit better!
Thanks a lot!!!

Interesting

So little off topic but as a hobbies I have an UnRaid server that is my Windows Gaming VM that is headless for streaming, I run dockers on my Synology NAS, and I’m also starting to build out a PiCluster to lear kubernetes and to run some home services. When the Zen 7000 comes out I’m planning to upgrade my UnRaid box and want to is my x470 board and 2700X to learn Proxmox or XPC-NG and host some game servers. Something that I have not found much info on is how many game servers can be hosted per VM?

I dislike anything Citrix related by default. Olivier's post changed my mind about XCP-NG. It's great to see this kind of engagement.

Interesting. Here I'd like to see some one who can explain us, why KVM, not Type1, could be less secure; or If is it really possible to jump VM to VM.

I am so glad I haven't seen your videos lately on xcp-ng.
I've recently got new servers to replace our existing ovirt cluster that was using shared storage.

Unfortunately RHEV/Ovirt has been sunsetted by Red hat in favor of openshift with the KVM module.

Tried it out and I really didn't care for it because it's actually a kubernetes system and I don't have that many containers to manage. I have more virtual machines still.

So then I tried harvester and rancher in combination. Again I feel like I could support this very well because I'm not familiar with kubernetes systems. But rancher did make it extremely easy so I'm intrigued by that product now. Mainly because I got some workloads I'd love to run and containers instead of dedicated vms.

But now comes my question, do you know of anybody that is running rancher with xcp-ng? I will admit, I was getting spoiled pretty quickly with ranchers ability to spin up new virtual nodes via harvester on demand and automatically. I'm wondering if there's any way to extend that functionality with this system.

Man!! What about bhive!!!

Yeah, citing, "well that's what amazon does!" is just kinda pathetic. Their employees feel the need to piss in bottles, they fire 10% of their employees every year because reasons, record their employees 24/7, etc... Do we really want to be like Amazon? And also, yeah, everything an Amazon or Google has/does is totally customized to them, despite what the base may have been.
I do have to say I think its stuff like, "Another difference in philosophy is to be truly open..." is where you start getting people fighting. If you say that being open is a difference in philosophies, then that is you explicitly saying the other philosophy is closed which is kind of ironic when just beforehand he kind of dumps on Proxmox for, "mostly integrating KVM and other open source technologies.." As opposed to using closed source technologies? Whats the cut here? He also implies Proxmox is more concerned with their email gateway than being masters of the virtualization stack. Now I don't know what the mix of proxmox business is (ie email gateway vs hypervisor) but considering Proxmox existed for 7 years before Vates, maybe their focus on email to hypervisor is a bit different now than when it started? I am not a commercial customer of Proxmox, but their devs have responded to me and been very helpful with questions I have had and raised in the forum, and they seem pretty good about integrating requests into their roadmaps and new releases. I have no experience with Vates, but I know I cannot list many other tech companies outside of Netgate with that level of response (though do have paid accounts with them, but still only referring to online questions). Go ask a newbie question in the Truenas forum and see what happens. You might get to meet the real Grinch.
Granted there could be some translation issues at play, but it seems a lot of what he says is less than subtle and should be interpreted as insults/digs against the other side.

I'm a homelab user who is about to play with XCP-ng for the first time. From what I've heard PCIe passthrough requires manually changing kernel boot options which may be reset with some updates as well as complicated command line operations using UUIDs. Is this the case, and if it is, are there plans to introduce a more user-friendly interface?

What about comparing lxd also?

Great video! Have you ever played with Nutanix and their KVM-based hypervisor called AHV?

Here is an example of the great communication to educate the public.

The reason the comment disappeared was probably that it was just too long. There is a limit at about 10,000 characters for what YT accepts, or that was it last time it bothered me.
Yep, once I had to divide a comment in 3 posts, before it stayed in YT. If, at that point, YT is still the right place to post it, becomes disputable...
...YT is probably trying to tell us that its comments are not a forum. ;)

I like both proxmox and xcp-ng+xen-orchestra equally.

Proxmox needs the following to win me over:
Multi Cluster management and inter-cluster migration just like how xen-orchestra can. Export a guest disk or vm into any format (ova, vhd, etc). Disk and VM imports need to a thing in the web interface. Do away with seeing vms as a number and instead use a UUID. Better tags and interface as hundreds of vms becomes a pain.

Xen-Orchestra/XCP-NG needs the following: Use a proper open source and compatible hyperconverged solution such as ceph instead of xo-San. Tpm support (coming soon), allow support for importing and exporting disk formats such as qcow2.

Given the availability of both projects, I'm about to spin up both of my older HP Z420 workstations and try them both out in a direct head-to-head comparison.

For me, what I want to evaluate is migrating my VMs OFF of VirtualBox and what I will be testing for is ease of migration and also performance.

That'll be an interesting project for me to do.

Another nice comparison, and an interesting perspective. Thanks.

First

Excellent, just excellent video. Thanks Tom.

how is tpm coming along under xcp? can't load a W11 vm without it, also Xen Orchestra needs a bit of a makeover I find myself going back to Xen Center to manage things, but I am still learning, thanks for the video Tom :)

I would like Tom to take a proper deeper look at proxmox because his comparison didn't even touch the sides for proxmox

¿Por que no los dos? I run XCP-ng & TrueNAS Core on my business’s systems (as per Tom’s suggestions), and Proxmox & TrueNAS Scale on my personal systems and I love it all. Super fun. I’ve tried ESXi a long time ago and didn’t care for it, but I didn’t hate it. I love using VMWare Workstation on desktop when the hypervisors aren’t available to me.
edit: Oh yeah, I’ve also used Hyper-V on WinServer2016 & Win10. Again, don’t hate it, it’s great for Win based OSes [super fast], but no easy webui to startup VMs from my tablet and I’ve distanced from Windows as much as I could. And, ‘I feel’ like bringing up VSphere is like bringing XenServer into the circle.

Have you ever used or researched UDS as a virtualise software? I come across them when looking for a self hosting citrix application virtualization services but they seem to do a lot of virtualization too 🙂

anything professional aka real business needs Type 1
very fast testsetup could be virtualbox/kvm Type 2
but even predeployment test/devel shld match live setup so shld be same as Type 1 sooo if company gets bigger its more cist effective to just abandon all Type 2 hypervizor technologies and focus on what truly matters ;-)

I would like to know about support options it's a different ball game when you run software in a enterprise environment. Redhat and Microsoft provide fantastic support VMware has been a hit or miss. We are currently evaluating a hypervisor switch and so far I have KVM, and Azure HCI on my list I will have to investigate XCP-NG.

More good stuff. I have spent time reading the XCP-NG forums, and there Oliver Lambert responds to posts regularly; they really do have an effective support community.
And talking diversity etc - Vates is a French company based in Grenoble, elsewhere most activity is in North America.

Thanks for the great content Tom and Oliver

Thanks for sharing Tom, I enjoyed that, going to pop over to your forum for a read later.

There’s a lot of hype and misleading information when it comes to the whole xen Projets. The main issue is that people don’t like complicated stuff, even seasoned IT pros, first the xen server and then xen orchestra? You have to understand that in a world of hyperconverged where software is king no enterprise out there will ever even consider the xen project as a candidate.
I take your argument about xen being deployed in many large enterprise with a grain of salt. It is quite clear that Citrix doesn’t really care about the project. How about cooling down the hypes for a second. Many mission critical application run on virtualization systems. KVM and Vsphere have proven time and time again to be the most reliable in terms of products features, SLA and just simply trust. While I agree with you on pfsense reliability this xen train you are on won’t take off. Furthermore, you say they have 10 dedicated developers? Have you any idea how many developers work on KVM every day? Go figure

Can Proxmox or XCP use advanced VM things? Things like Direct IO / SV-IOV or vGPU with Tesla cards.

Your XCP-NG videos impressed me and I started playing with it, as a possible replacement for ESXi we have at work. However, just yesterday I discovered that XCP-NG does not allow memory overprovisioning, and in fact will not start a VM if there's not enough physical memory for it!

That was quite a shock, and is absolutely a showstopper for us. Memory deduplication in ESXi means we're consistently able to run ~350 GB worth of VMs on a 256 GB system and have not swapped/ballooned anything yet (so no slowdown of any kind). And if we ever do balloon, hey, it still works just fine. Those are not performance critical systems.

This is the kind of critical info that I'm hoping to get from those comparisons :)

Only reason I went with proxmox over XCP-NG is because I had played with proxmox before and decided to continue using it when I wanted to start hosting things in my homelab. If or when things start to break massively I will give XCP-NG a fair shake and see if I like it more. After watching both of your videos I can see why you prefer one over the other.

just in time Tom. Wish to see more content on KVM.

Citrix had its time....

a few things id love to see, since they watch and i need something to replace vmware.
1. training with a cert path
2. an app store of sorts to download os from say turnkey linux, deb or even windows to make it similar to a cloud deployment of an os

I've been watching your videos on this series. Been trying to decide if I'm going with proxmox or xcp-ng on my new n6005 router box. Thanks for posting this updated video.