For the Technophiles ….
There is a very large selection of cloud-based infrastructure available today. Do a Google search, and you will be amazed how many folks are offering these services. It feels like a crowded space, filled with confusing offerings. I came across the table below, which goes a long way towards helping me understand what each of the technology platforms offer, and the circumstances under which one works better than the other. I hope you will find this useful in your own forays into the new world of the cloud.
|
VPS Platforms |
Virtuozzo |
Xen |
Hyper-V |
VMWare |
| Recommended for Linux | x | x | ||
| Recommended for Windows | x | x | x | |
| Best guaranteed resource and performance | x | x | x | |
| Support for Virtual Memory (swap) | x | x | x | |
| Supports custom kernels and modules | x | x | x | |
| Live migration | x | x | x | x |
| Fully virtualized | x | x | x | |
| OS level virtualization | x | |||
| VPS snapshots | x | x | x | |
| Customer provided ISO/VPS images | x | x | x | |
| Best value for money | ||||
| Automatic Linus Kernel updates and patches | x | |||
| Automatic Windows updates and patches | x | |||
| Supports Hypervisor high availability | x | x | ||
| Supports Hypervisor fault tolerance | x | |||
| Backups | x | x | x | x |
I also find it interesting that our ability to rent dedicated servers instead of virtual servers has been greatly enhanced. But watch out. Not everyone is offering you the ability to mix and match, or letting you manage it yourself with easy access to the console, and as always there are limitations. It all boils down to what you are trying to do and what would work best.
