Chapter 11. Choosing a Hypervisor: Supported Features

CloudStack supports many popular hypervisors. Your cloud can consist entirely of hosts running a single hypervisor, or you can use multiple hypervisors. Each cluster of hosts must run the same hypervisor.

You might already have an installed base of nodes running a particular hypervisor, in which case, your choice of hypervisor has already been made. If you are starting from scratch, you need to decide what hypervisor software best suits your needs. A discussion of the relative advantages of each hypervisor is outside the scope of our documentation. However, it will help you to know which features of each hypervisor are supported by CloudStack. The following table provides this information.

Feature	XenServer 6.0.2	vSphere 4.1/5.0	KVM - RHEL 6.2	OVM 2.3	Bare Metal
Network Throttling	Yes	Yes	No	No	N/A
Security groups in zones that use basic networking	Yes	No	Yes	No	No
iSCSI	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	N/A
FibreChannel	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	N/A
Local Disk	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
HA	Yes	Yes (Native)	Yes	Yes	N/A
Snapshots of local disk	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	N/A
Local disk as data disk	No	No	No	No	N/A
Work load balancing	No	DRS	No	No	N/A
Manual live migration of VMs from host to host	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	N/A
Conserve management traffic IP address by using link local network to communicate with virtual router	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	N/A