From VMware to XCP-ng

jasonnix

Hello,
I would recommend XCP-ng to someone instead of VMware. He tells me that perhaps the only advantage XCP-ng has over ESXi is its lower price, otherwise VMware has more security and power. is it correct?

Cheers.

paulorrockgit

It depends on what you use vmware for. If it's all the deep level stuff like VSAN etc then yes vmware has the upper hand (although it is coming to xcp-ng from what I have seen). However if you have VMs that you want to run with High Availability on shared storage with an integrated backup solution the XCP-NG wins and its much cheaper than vmware especially post broadcom.

Paul

planedrop

Security and power? I wouldn't say that. VMware certainly has more in depth features and complex scenarios that it can accommodate, but that doesn't make it more secure, in fact complexity usually brings worse security and I'd make a strong argument that XCP-ng is the more secure choice.

Power wise, VMware tends to have a lot of overhead and super high spec requirements for more basic things, so I would also give XCP-ng the lead here, it's extremely efficient and so is Xen Orchestra. Even a basic VMware setup with the lowest end of vCenter Server installed is going to use a ton of RAM and be slow, vCenter also takes absolutely forever to boot.

Unless the situation calls for very specific VMware features, or some vendor says they will only run their stuff on VMware, I'd say it's best to avoid it TBH. It's also been far less stable in my use and when there are issues it's often much harder to resolve them, even with VMware's in depth documentation and KB articles.

jbamford

@jasonnix Depends what the requirement are, extras like vSAN will require licensing but Type 1 Hypervisors are all like this tbh. Personally when it comes to shared to storage I would either recommend using iSCSI or NFS than vSAN only because you would require high speed networking. Performance. In my testing between ESXi and XCP-ng there aren’t many differences but then again it all depends on the hardware that is being used. I’ve tested on R710s, R620s, R630s and all performed quite well.

Security. That is all down to the Technician that has deployed it, I wouldn’t expose it to the Public for sure.

jasonnix

Hi @planedrop,
1- Can XCP-ng communicate with storage devices like QNAP or EMC?

2- Is Xen Hypervisor more secure than VMkernel?

3- In VMware, it is possible to create complex networks with vSwitch. Is XCP-ng capable of such things?

jasonnix

Hi @jbamford,
So XCP-ng does not currently have some features like vSAN!

jbamford

@jasonnix Yes XCP-ng has vSAN look here https://xcp-ng.org/docs/storage.html#storage-types it is called XOSAN.

XCP-ng will work fine with EMC & QNAP. I am using two EMC iSCSI SANs with my 3 node Cluster.

john.c

@jasonnix On top of this it can also utilise the NFS and SMB protocols. You can thus choose from iSCSI, NFS or SMB which ever is right for the migration deployment.

planedrop

@jasonnix

Yes, it can connect to many different kinds of network storage devices, just depends on how the share is exposed, but it'll do NFS, iSCSI, and SMB.
I would say so, I'm not some security expert (at least not at a programming/evaluating hypervisor level) but it's certainly a simpler system.
Well, depends how complex you are asking, there is virtual networking within XCP-ng.