Re: VMWARE/ESXi Linux

On 12/3/2024 9:33 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

On 12/2/2024 10:09 PM, Waldek Hebisch wrote:

Matthew R. Wilson <mwilson@mattwilson.org> wrote:

KVM is largely dependent on qemu to provide the rest of the actual
virtual system. qemu's a great project and I run a ton of desktop VMs
with qemu+KVM, but it just doesn't have the level of maturity or
edge-case support that ESXi does. Pretty much any x86 operating system,
historical or current, _just works_ in ESXi.  With qemu+KVM, you're
going to have good success with the "big name" OSes...Windows, Linux,
the major BSDs, etc., but you're going to be fighting with quirks and
problems if you're trying, say, old OS/2 releases. That's not relevant
for most people looking for virtualization solutions, and the problems
aren't always insurmountable, but you're claiming that KVM is a "better"
solution, whereas in my experience, in reality, ESXi is the better
technology.

>
What you wrote is now very atypical use: faithfully implementing
all quirks of real devices.  More typical case is guest which
knows that it is running on a hypervisor and uses virtual
interface with no real counterpart.  For this quality of
virtual interfaces matters.  I do not know how ESXi compares
to KVM, but I know that "equivalent" but different virtual
interfaces in qemu+KVM may have markedly different performance.

 Are you talking about paravirtual drivers?
 To get back to VMS then I don't think VMS got any of those.

Hmm. Not correct. Reading 9.2-3 installation notes:
<quote>
Also, two para-virtualized NICs, virtio for KVM, and VMXNET 3 for ESXi.
</quote>
Arne