43 lines
1.9 KiB
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43 lines
1.9 KiB
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======================
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Choosing a hypervisor
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======================
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A hypervisor provides software to manage virtual machine access to the
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underlying hardware. The hypervisor creates, manages, and monitors
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virtual machines. OpenStack Compute (nova) supports many hypervisors to various
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degrees, including:
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* `KVM <http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page>`_
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* `LXC <https://linuxcontainers.org/>`_
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* `QEMU <http://wiki.qemu.org/Main_Page>`_
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* `VMware ESX/ESXi <https://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere-hypervisor>`_
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* `Xen <http://www.xenproject.org/>`_
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* `Hyper-V <http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831531.aspx>`_
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* `Docker <https://www.docker.com/>`_
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An important factor in your choice of hypervisor is your current organization's
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hypervisor usage or experience. Also important is the hypervisor's feature
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parity, documentation, and the level of community experience.
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As per the recent OpenStack user survey, KVM is the most widely adopted
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hypervisor in the OpenStack community. Besides KVM, there are many deployments
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that run other hypervisors such as LXC, VMware, Xen and Hyper-V. However, these
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hypervisors are either less used, are niche hypervisors, or have limited
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functionality based on the more commonly used hypervisors. This is due to gaps
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in feature parity.
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In addition, the nova configuration reference below details feature support for
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hypervisors as well as ironic and Virtuozzo (formerly Parallels).
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The best information available to support your choice is found on the
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`Hypervisor Support Matrix
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<https://docs.openstack.org/developer/nova/support-matrix.html>`_
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and in the `configuration reference
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<https://docs.openstack.org/mitaka/config-reference/compute/hypervisors.html>`_.
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.. note::
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It is also possible to run multiple hypervisors in a single
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deployment using host aggregates or cells. However, an individual
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compute node can run only a single hypervisor at a time.
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