What Hypervisor is better for me?

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danielpmc

New member
Hello everybody,

My experience is with WHM/cPanel both as a Reseller and Root access using a managed VPS. Last month i was left without a hosting company when they sold their company and i did not want to be with the company that bought them. So i have been looking at various hosting companies and their Control panels. I was hoping someone here that has first hand experience with hypervisors would help me out with these questions.

1. What is a hypervisor?

2. Pros?

3. Cons?

4. Hypervisor vs cPanel, if applicable, details

Thanks for any info.
 
I spent the rest of the day reading through the hypervisor wikipedia and following the links. I feel like i read an encyclopedia. Would have prefered a conversation about it with humans, but now i am better informed regardless.
 
Hi,

An hypervisor is the manager of a VPS environment, basically. It's not a control panel to manage the software running on a VPS. I'll slow down a little here :)

The question should be: What Hypervisor is better for me?

There are several types of hypervisors, such as xen, kvm, hvm, openvz, virtualbox. All of them have differences from each other and you should choose your hypervisor according with your needs.

For example, if you need a development environment, where you need a lot of resources temporarily and cheap, you should go with KVM or OpenVZ (being kvm full virtualized, and openvz a container).

If you prefer to go with a more stable solution, you should use Xen/HVM. Xen does have a Paravirtualized environment, perfect to run Linux distros.

If you prefer to use a environment at home, then use Virtualbox (it's free!). It works perfectly! You can run windows, linux, whatever!

All of the hypervisors that I've mentioned, can have cPanel installed (since this is OS dependant, and not VPS dependant). So you should be able to install CentOS and cPanel on any of these hypervisors. By doing this, you will have a control panel to manage the distro (CentOS) and your webhosting requirements.

Of course, there are control panels to manage the VPS itself, such as solusvm, proxmox, and more.


Hope that I was able to reply to your question.
 
LusoVPS said:
Hi,

An hypervisor is the manager of a VPS environment, basically. It's not a control panel to manage the software running on a VPS.
Click to expand...

Thank you very much for the info. I knew that there was a correlation between the two but i just did not know what. Your info clears up a lot for me.

Moderators: Could you change the title of my thread to "What Hypervisor is better for me?" as this would better represent the thread. Thanks.
 
Last edited:
I have a fairly good grasp on what Vitualbox, OpenVZ and KVM are about, but i am not really familiar with XEN or HVM. Everything i have done or will do online is using Linux.

1. Could somebody offer more details about XEN and HVM?

2. What is Paravirtualized environment?

Thanks
 
danielpmc said:
I have a fairly good grasp on what Vitualbox, OpenVZ and KVM are about, but i am not really familiar with XEN or HVM. Everything i have done or will do online is using Linux.

1. Could somebody offer more details about XEN and HVM?

2. What is Paravirtualized environment?

Thanks
Click to expand...

A little bit late to reply, but...

Xen/HVM is also an hypervisor, being the HVM the Full virtualization (just like KVM) and PV being the paravirtualized. The later is a lower layer, more close to the host kernel with increased performance compared to HVM. Both use their own kernel to load, and that's a major plus for Xen.
 
Hi,

Xen has 2 types (PV and HVM) in it. PV is for Linux and some NIX distributions only, however, if you are planning to install Windows, then Xen HVM does the job for you, so in short, PV has limited to NIX distributions, and HVM is Windows + Nix distrbutions..
 
We use Proxmox, and it is totally free, by the way. You just have to add the "non-subscription" package repository to get updates.
 
Paravirtualization = XEN PV
Hypervisor = HVM

Basically as someone else mentioned, Para is just limited virtualization that can only has limited functionality with the kernel and host virtualization. Hyperviros can run their own dedicated ISO based OS on each VPS allowing for truly any OS to be installed and interact with the actual hardware of the node.
 
danielpmc said:
Hello everybody,

My experience is with WHM/cPanel both as a Reseller and Root access using a managed VPS. Last month i was left without a hosting company when they sold their company and i did not want to be with the company that bought them. So i have been looking at various hosting companies and their Control panels. I was hoping someone here that has first hand experience with hypervisors would help me out with these questions.

1. What is a hypervisor?

2. Pros?

3. Cons?

4. Hypervisor vs cPanel, if applicable, details

Thanks for any info.
Click to expand...

1. It's a bare metal machine on which you install a virtualization software so you can slice one physical server into more, smaller pieces (servers)

2. Before the virtualization came to be, you had to have separate physical server for everything. For example, you might already have a dedicated server that runs something, but you want to install something else because there are free resources available. But you couldn't, because the new thing you were installing might conflict with what is already running on that server. So even though you had free resources on the server, you couldn't use them. Virtualization solved this problem by enabling you to have several servers fully isolated from each other, on the same physical machine, thus making those free resources usable again.

3. It is has a performance penalty because you now have two layers (the guest OS (domU) and the host's OS (dom0)). However, this has advanced a lot and the performance impact is minimal nowadays. Mostly thanks to direct pass through of drivers from the guest machine to the host machine

4. You can't compare those two because it's comparing apples and oranges. Hypervisor is simply a host machine and cPanel is a control panel. However, you can boot a VM (VPS) on a hypervisor and run cPanel on it.

If you want to choose best hypervisor, it all depends on what you need. If you answer these questions, I can tell you what virtualization is best for you:

- Do you want your VMs to have hardware style isolation (the resources you dedicate to a VM can't be used by other VMs on the same machine) or you want the other VM to be able to take resources from the another VM when it needs them?

- Do you need to be able to access the graphical console (to see the screen of a VM, like with Windows for example), or you just need the ability to SSH directly into the machine like with Linux?
 
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