FBSD jail versus VMWare? What services do YOU run in a jail?

[Alejandro Imass]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 12:02 AM, Boris <borisbsd at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Alejandro,
>
> Can you move a 'live' jail from server to server?

Not that I am aware at least not with EZJail The archive method needs
the jail to be down AFAIK.

> I have never tried but some people like the vMotion option from VMware and
> for having tried it, it's quite impressive in action.
>

Each has it's advantages IMO. Pseudo-virtulization like Jails give you
the advantage of little overhead, less resources, and IMHO nothing
beats running on the real HW. Besides, VMWare costs a wagon load of
money whilst FreeBSD Jails are basically free in license terms at
least.

Honestly, when I said "just like VMWare" I wasn't trying to actually
compare, but rather illustrating that with EZJail you can get many of
the benefits/easiness of use of VMWare, VirtualBox and alike, not
particularly VMWare. EZJails archive and restore, flavours, and many
other features of ezjail-admin add a lot of value on top  of the
already great Jail system.

> For the rest, I used jails a long long time ago, I guess Marketing was not
> behind jails the same way it has been behind VMware products although, to be
> fair, GSX and ESX have be out there for ages...there has been a lot more
> press since ESXi4.something and 5
>

Actually, I don't think they are really comparable as in apples to
apples without a clear set of constraints.

In the OP's original question, Jails could actually provide a solution
to an overly bloated pure virtualization environment, but its really
depends on the specific application IMO. In our case, we just need to
make the most of out of limited budget and Jails allow us to squeeze
every bit out of our servers. We run literally dozens and dozens of
Jails per server and pay $2-4K per server per year. I don't think we
could pull that off with VMWare or any cloud env like AWS.

Best,

Alejandro Imass